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THE 



HIERARCHICAL DESPOTISM. 



LECTURES 



ON THE 



MIXTURE OF CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL POWER 



IN THE 



GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 

IN ILLUSTRATION OF THE NATURE AND PROGRESS 
OF DESPOTISM EN THE ROMISH CHURCH. 



REV. GEOKGE BfCHEEVER. **, 



NEW YORK : A 

PUBLISHED BY SAXTON & MILES, 

205 Broadway. 
BOSTON : SAXTON, PEIRCE <fc CO. 

1844, 




■&P' It 

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& 



Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1844, by 

SAXTON & MILES. 

in the Clerk's office of the District Court for the Southern Distsict of 

New York, 



S. W. BENEDICT & CO., PRINT., 

128 Fulton Street. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The following argument has been suggested and called forth 
by an ingenious lecture of Bishop Hughes on the Mixture of 
Civil and Ecclesiastical Power in the Governments of the Mid- 
dle Ages. Under this plausible and captivating title the reader 
finds a bold, unflinching apology for the Papacy, with the start- 
ling proposition that it is to the Despotism of the Papacy in the 
middle ages that we owe the preservation of Christianity, and the 
possession of all our civil freedom. I do not give the words, 
but the amount of his assertions. The lecture was exceedingly 
able in point of style and scholarship, and mingled with very 
plausible admissions as to the errors of the Papacy; which cir- 
cumstances render it so much the more important to put the 
affirmations of the Lecturer in their true light, and especially to 
show that the Romish Church, instead of disavowing the union 
of Church and State, constitutes in herself the very essence of 
such union. Her heart in Italy is such a union ; the Pope's 
temporal sovereignty constitutes the left ventricle, his spiritual 
supremacy the right ; and through these two systems pours the 
life-blood of the Romish Church to the world's extremities. 

It is equally necessary to set in their proper light the astound- 
ing positions of Bishop Hughes as to the affirmed Republicanism 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

of Popery, and to show that in all ages the Romish Church has 
been the enemy both of civil and religious liberty. Whether 
Bishop Hughes expected to be believed in his singular asser- 
tions by any but the members of his own communion we know 
not ; but ours is not the country, nor this the age, when such po- 
sitions can be assumed for a moment without question. They 
are so startlingly and sweepingly opposed to all historic truth, 
that as hearers of Bishop Hughes' lecture, we really felt tempted 
to question whether he was not playing the satirist with the 
assumed ignorance and credulity of his audience ; whether he 
was not trying the experiment how far he might enjoy a practi- 
cal joke on the capacity of their laith in the assertions of the 
Priesthood. As the very first step in his lecture, he asserted 
that it was not the genius of the Romish Church to conceal any- 
thing of her doctrines or her history ! The late freaks enacted 
with the school-books in this city afford an admirable commen- 
tary on this declaration. 

The reader will see that the course we have taken in these 
lectures on such a subject as that announced by Bishop Hughes, 
is very different from that which we should have pursued had we 
taken up that subject on its civil rather than its ecclesiastical side. 
Bishop Hughes having taken his stand-point in the Papacy, we 
were compelled to take ours there also, and to show that the Pa- 
pacy, as the example, by eminence, of the Mixture of Civil and 
Ecclesiastical Power in the Governments of the Middle Ages, 
was the most perfect and terrific Despotism the world ever saw. 

We are indebted to the Rev. Charles Hall, of this city, for 
the appropriate Stanzas on the 64th page, entitled " The Pil- 
grims' Legacy," which were sung at the close of the First Lec- 
ture. 



HIERARCHICAL DESPOTISM. 



FIRST LECTURE. 



NATURE OF THE ARGUMENT. 

In all speculations on Ecclesiastical History there is 
no way to criticise correctly, but by placing ourselves 
first in the light of Christianity at its beginning. We 
cannot begin with the Fathers, but in the New Testa- 
ment, in order to a proper judgment of any portion of 
the history of the Church that has passed since. It is 
like tracing a mountain torrent from its source in a 
living rock. You may stand at that source, and follow 
the stream a little while in its purity. Mark now the 
rills, as you pass along, that run into it. At first they 
are small, and much like the original fountain in their 
clearness. Sometimes there seems to be a silver cas- 
cade coming out of the heavens ; such seemed at first 
the fond veneration of the martyrs, and afterwards the 
cherished remembrance of the Virgin Mary, both of 
these things to become a torrent of dark idolatry. As 
you come down from the air of the mountain into the 
2 



FIRST LECTURE. 



level world, there are muddy and brawling brooks that 
pour like rivers into your original stream. Sometimes 
it spreads out into a wide lake or marsh. Now if, 
when you put yourself back at any point after these 
intermixtures have become the body of the stream, 
you shut yourself up to that scenery, if you judge 
with the judgment of the inhabitants along its banks, 
it will seem to you a useful stream, a fertilizing body 
of water, perfectly suited to the times. But this is 
not your proper judgment as a Christian. This water 
w T here you stand, after all these worldly intermixtures, 
is not Christianity, but the body of its corruptions. 
Follow it still onward, and sometimes it flows like the 
river of Lethe through helL It leads you where, as in 
a southern swamp, the trees grow in dripping festoons 
of impurity, where it is dark at noonday, where below 
you, the black backs of alligators look like the trunks 
of trees for you to step upon, and in the branches 
above you unclean bats and birds of darkness croak 
and flap their wings to terrify you. Such was the 
Papacy, the Romish Church, for hundreds of years, 
with almost all the institutions that grew out of it ; 
the sanctified, consecrated slough and swamp of the 
world's impurities. 

Sometimes this same river, now become a river of 
death, runs through deep, dark, vast, magnificent ca- 
verns ; where, when you carry your torches, the roofs 
are pendent with blazing stalactites, and the walls 
seem to sparkle with living diamonds. Here, as in a 
Gothic Cathedral in the dark ages, if you stop and 
celebrate the mass with the inhabitants, you will think 
it the most gorgeous imposing ceremony in the world ; 



NATURE OF THE ARGUMENT. 7 

you may perhaps speculate on the excellence of that 
system, which, in a period of such ignorance, could 
throw so sacred a spell over the mind of the world's 
congregated multitudes. If you please to forget the 
calm clear sunlight of your primitive Christianity, you 
may perhaps say, How holy and how awful is the 
gloom of religious solemnity diffused over the spirit by 
this darkness, relieved so sacredly by the blaze of wax 
tapers and jewelled altars ! How great a blessing 
was the Romish Church at this period to the world ! 
But if you remember the simplicity and noonday clear- 
ness of the New Testament faith, you will feel that 
had it not been for that Romish Church, and its conse- 
cration and concentration of the corruptions of Christ- 
ianity for ages into one system of combined superstition 
and despotism, the world during those dark ages would 
have been in the clear sunlight of the gospel, instead 
of worshipping by torch-light amidst the caverns and 
petrifactions of Popery. 

We have a vast subject before us, and I am sure I 
can trust the candor and intelligence of my audience 
for a patient investigation of it. I shall begin at the 
beginning, as certainly you would all wish me to do, 
and if in tracing the progress of a great despotic uni- 
versal Hierarchy, such as the mixture of civil and 
ecclesiastical power must always constitute, from its 
first threadlike roots in the primitive Church of Christ 
to its mighty trunk and its overshadowing foliage, I 
should seem to cut athwart sectarian prejudices, I pray 
you to believe that it is with a charitable spirit and in 
the pursuit of truth. In cutting our way to a conclu- 
sion we are sometimes unconscious whose brush-wood 



8 FIRST LECTURE. 

our blows strike ; let us but clear the path, and then 
settle with the owners of the land afterwards. Noth- 
ing that I say shall be set down in prejudice or bitter- 
ness. I am turning the leaves of history, and in di- 
recting your attention to the features of the Romish 
Church as there delineated, and reasoning from what 
it has been in all past ages, and under almost all forms 
of government, to what, unless the spirit of God descend 
upon it, it is likely to be still in this age and under our 
form of government, I have not a'' particle of other 
than affectionate and friendly feeling towards all the 
Romanists in this country, wishing them all w r ell, wish- 
ing them the highest blessings they can enjoy in this 
world, even the uninterrupted enjoyment of all our civil 
and religious privileges, and the greatest gift God can 
bestow upon them in the next world, even life eternal 
through his dear Son. May God thus bless them all, 
and enlighten them and us alike with the precious 
light and liberty of the gospel. We go for truth and 
freedom, wherever we can find it, and against the 
spirit of oppression wherever we find that. 

I was greatly interested, not many evenings ago, 
in hearing Bishop Hughes' ingenious lecture on the 
mixture of civil and ecclesiastical power in the govern- 
ments of the middle ages. I admired his ingenuity, 
his talent, his scholarship, his gentlemanly bearing ; 
but as I came to conclusions directly the reverse of his, 
I determined to take some early opportunity to de- 
velope them, and to show the grounds of a deep con- 
viction that to trace the mixture of civil and ecclesiasti- 
cal power in the middle ages would be, 'in point of 
fact, to trace the progress of despotism in the Romish 
Church. 



POINTS OF SOPHISTRY. 



POINTS OF SOPHISTRY TO BE NOTED. 

But before entering on this investigation, I must 
notice two points of sophistry. It is a very common 
piece of sophistry to predicate of the Romish Church 
that which belongs to Christianity apart from the 
Romish Church, and even that period of Ecclesiastical 
History, which passed before the Romish Papal Church 
had an existence. The three first centuries of Chris- 
tianity do not belong to the history of the Papacy, al- 
though even then the seeds were sowing of those 
dreadful corruptions and disorders, which afterwards 
grew in such a deadly harvest all over the world. 
We can trace back the roots of the Romish Papal 
Church into the three first centuries of Christianity ; 
but it is because we find in those centuries the begin- 
nings of the corruptions of Christianity. 

It is another piece of sophistry similar to this, and a 
very dangerous one, to make the Church and Chris- 
tianity one and the same ; for when this is done, ten to 
one almost all the real Christianity in the world is 
out of the Church in the form of proscribed dissent and 
heresy, so that the Church has nothing but the mould, 
emptied of the spirit, and true Christianity is apart in 
desert places. It has often been so in this world's 
history. 

A Church therefore may be the Catholic Church, 
and yet not the Christian Church ; that is, she may be 
the reigning universal Church, the Church Catholic, 
embracing vast multitudes of members in opposition to 
the Church Elect, embracing only the comparatively 



10 FIRST LECTURE. 

few, that have the spirit and the truth of Christ. And 
I say, in proportion as this tenet prevails, namely, that 
the Church and Christianity are one and the same, 
true religion declines, Christianity becomes first a 
nominal profession, then a cloak of covetousness and 
ambition, then an open sink of corruption and sin. 
Moreover, the god of this world knows well when 
Christianity hath departed, or is departing, from the 
Church. He sees it, when men do not. The priests 
may keep up their watch-fires to deceive the people 
and keep the world in aw r e, and make men think the 
camp is full of soldiers ; but the adversary of man- 
kind knows when the hosts are stealing out, and no 
creeds or formulas or watch-fires can deceive him. 
And when Christianity is departing from the Church, 
then, so far as in him lies, he assists the Church in 
rising to grandeur and pow T er ; for then and thus the 
Church itself becomes his greatest instrument of human 
ruin. The best things, both in earth and heaven, be- 
come the worst, w<hen perverted and depraved ; if the 
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that 
darkness ; an angel fallen becomes a demon, not a 
man ; and so a Christianity corrupted becomes the most 
dreadful agent and element of hell. 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY. 

In tracing the progress of despotism in the Church 
it is necessary to go back to its first constitution in the 
New Testament. The chief officers of the Church of 
Christ in its infancy are included under these three 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY. 11 

names, emaxonoi, nQBo^vxeQoi, diav.ovoi, bishops or 
overseers, presbyters or elders, and deacons or attend- 
ants. The terms miaxono* and nQea^vreqot are used in 
the New Testament promiscuously and synonymously, 
as is everywhere admitted. Turn to the 20th chapter 
of Acts, and you find that Paul sent to Ephesus from 
Miletus, and called the Elders of the Church, rovg 
TiQeafivTZQovg Tqg exxlycnag. When convened, he spoke 
thus to them : Take heed therefore to yourself, and to 
all the flock, over which the Holy Ghost hath made 
you overseers, emaxanoxfc, elsewhere in our translation, 
bishops, but signifying literally overseers. The same 
persons, then, are here denominated presbyters (or 
elders) and bishops. So in the Epistle to Titus, first 
chapter : " For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou 
shouldst set in order the things that are wanting, and 
ordain elders in evesy city. If any be blameless, &c. 
For a bishop must be blameless." Here again it is 
clear that the two terms are synonymous. So in the 
first Epistle of Peter : " The elders which are among 
you I exhort, who am also an elder, feed the flock of 
God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, 5 ' 
ETiKjxoTTovvTeg, acting the snHjy.ortog, fulfilling the office 
of a bishop, a presbyter. The term smoxonog, overseer, 
bishop, doubtless came from the nature of the office, 
and the term TtQea^vTsgog may at first have arisen 
from the choice of the older persons to the office, 
adopted, however, from the Jewish custom of so desig- 
nating the members of the Sanhedrim, and of the city 
councils. Not a solitary passage is to be found in the 
New Testament intimating that these two words ever 
stood for different offices. In accordance with this, 



12 FIRST LECTURE. 

Paul in writing to the Church at Philippi addresses 
himself thus : To all the saints at Philippi, with the 
bishops and deacons. About sixty years after this we 
are able to compare an epistle by Poly carp to the same 
congregation at Philippi, in which he mentions only 
two orders, the presbyters and the deacons. Again, 
we are told of the Apostles Paul and Barnabas, that 
when journeying together, they ordained elders in 
every Church. With all this corresponds the declara- 
tion of Jerome: Apostolus perspicue docet eosdem 
esse Presbyteros quos Episcopos ; the Apostle clearly 
teaches that presbyters and bishops are the same. 
Jerome goes on to state that afterwards, as a matter 
of expediency, there was one chosen among the pres- 
byters in each church who should preside over the 
others. He was at first denominated in the Apoca- 
lypse the angel, but afterwards the bishop. 

In the first and second centuries a bishop had charge 
of a single church, and was its minister. The most 
ancient uninspired Christian writing, the Epistle of 
Clemens Romanus to the Corinthians, written about 
the beginning of the second century (supposed to be 
the same Clement whom Paul calls his fellow-laborer), 
declares that " the Apostles, having preached the gos- 
pel in countries and towns, constituted the first fruits 
of their ministry, whom they approved by the Spirit, 
bishops and deacons of those who should believe." 
This Epistle is styled the Epistle of the Church of 
God at Rome to the Church of God at Corinth. An 
Episcopal historian ( Waddington) observes concerning 
this Epistle from the Church at Rome to the Church 
in Corinth, that it is clear that the Episcopal form of 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY. 13 

government was not yet here established, probably as 
being adverse to the republican spirit of Greece. 

This is a singular concession, and if the reason al- 
leged were true, it would show how remarkably the 
republican spirit and the spirit of the New Testament 
coincide. But it would have been a singular reason to 
give for the non-establishment of the Episcopal form 
of government, if that government had been jure 
divino. For the Church of Corinth to say to Paul, 
We will not have the Episcopal government be- 
cause of the staunch republican spirit of our coun- 
try, would have been almost the counterpart of King 
James's maxim — no bishop, no king. King James 
reasoned that the Episcopal and Monarchical forms of 
government must stand or fall together ; and this Co- 
rinthian Church are supposed to have reasoned that if 
they received the Episcopal form of government it 
WT>uld be adverse to their republican spirit. In truth, 
the reason why the Episcopal form was not there esta- 
blished was because it was nowhere established, and 
has been nowhere revealed from heaven. The Corin- 
thian Church was not different in its form of govern- 
ment from any other Churches. 

The Churches thus constituted with their ministers, 
were independent of each other, and elected their own 
bishops, presbyters, or pastors. It was the simplest 
form of Church government, and the most coincident 
with the commands and warnings of our blessed Lord : 
Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise do- 
minion over them, and they who are great exercise au- 
thority upon them; but it shall not be so among 
~ 2* ~~ 



14 FIRST LECTURE. 

you. All ye are brethren. Call no man Master on 
earth, for one is your Master even Christ. 

" In this century and the next" (says a historian who 
has always from all parties received the praise of ac- 
curacy and impartiality, Dr. Mosheim), " a bishop had 
charge of a single Church, which might ordinarily be 
contained in a private house ; nor w r as he its lord, but 
was in reality its minister or servant ; he instructed the 
people, conducted all parts of public worship, and at- 
tended on the sick and necessitous in person; and 
what he was unable thus to perform, he committed to 
the care of the presbyters ; but without power to or- 
dain or determine anything, except with the concur- 
rence of the presbyters and the brotherhood. The 
emoluments of this singularly laborious and perilous 
office were very small. For the Churches had no re- 
venues, except the voluntary contributions of the peo- 
ple, or the oblations ; which, moderate as they doubt- 
less were, were divided among the bishop, the presby- 
ters, the deacons, and the poor of the church." Such 
was the primitive arrangement, so simple, so utterly 
removed from all pride and domination, a kingdom in- 
deed not of this world. The church w T as an assembly 
of believers under Christ their head, choosing their 
own ministers. 

RISE OF DIOCESAN EPISCOPACY. 

But this did not last. In process of time, the bishops 
in the cities, by their own labors and those of the 
presbyters, gathered other churches in the neighbor- 
ing regions, and the pastors of those churches came to 
be considered in a measure inferior to the city bishops, 



RISE OF DIOCESAN EPISCOPACY. 15 

who took the superintendence of them, and so, gradu- 
ally became overseers of provinces, which were deno- 
minated dioceses. From being pastors of single 
churches, they became superintendents of many pas- 
tors. There was also a distinction made between 
country bishops and city bishops ; and by-and-by, 
when ambition grew, and the desire to have a great 
diocese, and to advance and increase the dignity of 
bishop, it was proposed to suppress the order of coun- 
try bishops, and to ordain no more bishops in villages 
and little towns, lest the episcopal name and authority 
should be brought into contempt. Thus grew a dis- 
parity in the clergy, the first step of evil in the Chris- 
tian Church ; thus was the door opened to the entrance 
of pride, ambition, worldliness, the amassing of wealth, 
the accumulation of grandeur. Thus grew up diocesan 
episcopacy, which, by the end of the third century was 
preparing to become a great hierarchy of many grada- 
tions and titles each rising above the other, and each 
the object of ambition in proportion to its wealth and 
dignity. In the councils of the churches by represen- 
tatives, which began to be held about the middle of 
the second century, there being a necessity for a presi- 
dent among the confederated bishops, the title and pre- 
rogatives of metropolitan grew up. The metropolis 
of the province would naturally be the place of meet- 
ing, and the bishop of the metropolis came naturally to 
be appointed as president, and at length to be regarded 
as such of course, and to be denominated the metropo- 
litan. The claims first set up by bishops above 
presbyters were then made by metropolitans over 
bishops, and then by patriarchs over metropolitans, and 



16 FIRST LECTURE. 

then by the Pope over the whole world. A corrupt 
state of the clergy followed upon the institution of all 
this hierarchical grandeur, and kept pace with it in 
arrogance, voluptuousness, and contentions for pre- 
eminence of rank and glory. Bishops adopted the 
state and grandeur of princes, particularly the bishops 
who had under them the more numerous and wealthy 
congregations; they sat on thrones surrounded by 
their ministers, and were clad in dazzling garments. 
The presbyters imitated the bishops, and the deacons 
imitated the presbyters, and then came a host of minor 
officers, sub-deacons, acolythes, readers, door-keepers, 
exorcists, and others. The people were at length ex- 
cluded from all voice in ecclesiastical affairs, and the 
bishops appropriated the ecclesiastical property to 
themselves, or distributed it as they pleased. 

From the time of Const antine, the wealth, honors, 
and privileges of the clergy in this vast hierarchy, first 
more accurately modelled and by law incorporated by 
him, received an immense increase. The bishops 
maintained disgraceful contests respecting the bounda- 
ries of their sees, and the extent of their jurisdiction ; 
they trampled on the rights of the people and the infe- 
rior clergy, and vied with the civil governors of pro- 
vinces in luxury, arrogance, and voluptuousness. 
Thus was reared an enormous fabric of Church gran- 
deur and dominion; and soon the very idea of the 
church as Christ instituted it, came to be forgotten. 
The church signified merely the church dignitaries ; 
people were not considered as a part of it, except as 
so much material to be used and governed. Power 
was considered inherent in particular offices, and the 



THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. 17 

custom of election, with its privileges, was entirely 
taken away from the people. ^^J. ^ 



THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. 

The episcopal authority became absolute. It is a 
deeply interesting matter to trace it from its beginnings. 
I might refer you to many authors, as the learned 
Peter Jurieu, Geiseler, Mosheim and others, but on this 
point I shall more directly take the assistance of Camp- 
bell, as beyond all question the most vigorous and 
accurate ecclesiastical anatomist. Among the early 
Christian societies there had grown up very naturally, 
from an unwillingness to go to law before unbelievers, 
the custom of nominating their pastors as judges or 
arbitrators in their questions of civil right and wrong. 
At length this trust of arbitration came to be con- 
sidered by the pastors as their right. Especially was 
it so asserted when the churches grew in wealth, and 
the bishops in a worldly sense did so magnify their 
offices. Then, when the Roman emperors became 
Christian, they were ready to confirm by law what- 
ever prerogatives were supposed to belong to Christ's 
ministers. So the bishop's power of judging was, un- 
der Constantine, ratified by the law; the magistrate 
was bound to execute his decision ; and in any cause 
before a secular power, if an appeal were made by 
either party to the court of the bishop, it was to be 
carried thither, and from that tribunal there could be 
no appeal. This was in effect "'throwing the whole 
judiciary power of the state into the hands of the 



18 FIRST LECTURE. 

clergy. All the ordinary judicatories were now re- 
duced to act solely in subordination to the spiritual 
courts, which could overrule the proceedings of the 
secular, whilst their own was not liable to be over- 
ruled by any." The effect of such power was inju- 
rious in the highest degree to the interests of religion. 
The dignitaries of the Church, having such vast author- 
ity, were flattered, caressed, bribed, courted by inferiors 
and dependents. The prelates, being armed with the 
terror of the magistrate, religion ceased to be the 
power of love, and men's consciences were trampled 
on. The prelates' had their appendages judicatorial, 
their chancellors, commissaries, officials, advocates, proc- 
tors, registrars, apparitors, etc. ; and bailiffs, tipstaves, 
fines, imprisonments, distraining of goods, coercive 
power in every shape, as Campbell with vigorous 
satire has remarked, came to be the order of the day 
instead of that beautiful simplicity of Paul, Now, I 
Paul, myself, beseech you by the meekness and gentle- 
ness of Christ. The jurisdiction of the bishops was 
greatly enlarged by successive emperors ; the principal 
bishops were chosen by the prince for his councillors, 
a distinction which added immense authority to the 
Episcopal tribunal. At length they assumed the abso- 
lute and exclusive right to all criminal and civil juris- 
diction over the clergy, and in various cases jeven over 
the laity, in ecclesiastical causes. In mixed causes 
they insisted that the bishop should be judge as well 
as the magistrate. They had a rule also that every 
cause should devolve on the ecclesiastical tribunal, if 
the magistrate either refused or neglected to do justice. 
And finally, they asserted that this power of judgment 



THE ECCLESIASTICAL JUDICATORY. 19 

in the bishop was a divine right, annexed by Christ to 
the essence of prelatical dominion, as one of its pre- 
rogatives. " Thus, in the course of ages, upon the spirit- 
ual power given by Christ to the Church of binding 
and loosing, that is, of excluding from, and receiving 
back into their communion, and upon the institution of 
Paul for terminating amicably their differences in mat- 
ters of property by reference (to believers), without 
recurring to the tribunal of infidels, there had been 
erected, by several degrees, a spiritual-temporal tribu- 
nal, the most wonderful the world ever saw." After- 
wards, in the more complete development of the Rom- 
ish hierarchy, the Popes claimed to be of divine right 
the fountain and depositaries of all secular as well as 
spiritual jurisdiction ; and one argument on which 
they founded this claim was this passage : They said, 
Lord, here are two swords. And he said, It is enough ; 
denoting that there were two sorts of power deposited 
by the Saviour with the Church, the temporal and the 
spiritual, and that these two were sufficient for all her 
occasions, and that these two were entrusted to the 
Pope because they were entrusted to Peter, and that 
they were entrusted to Peter because he cut off the 
right ear of Malchus with one of them, and he must 
have had both ! How dark must have been the state 
of the world when such an argument could dare to be 
palmed upon it ! 

But what can be said when I tell you that not to 
ignorance and superstition was this argument confined, 
but that St. Bernard himself, an angel of light, in com- 
parison with the darkness of the Papacy, and yet, with 
all his learning, the most unflinching of the Papal 



20 FIRST LECTURE. 

champions, condescended to employ the same argu- 
ment ! The spiritual and material swords, said he, 
belong to the Church ; and if it did not belong to the 
Pope to use them, or to his nod to have them drawn, 
the Lord, when two swords were offered to him, would 
not have said it is enough, but, it is too much ! Aston- 
ishing mixture of piety and pride, of religion and learn- 
ing, with the demon of spiritual aggrandizement ! 



THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 

In the progress of the Hierarchy to its perfection, 
the principal cities of the Roman Empire, Rome, Con- 
stantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, came to be 
dignified with the title of Patriarch. The jealousy be- 
tween these cities came at length to a contest of rivalry 
between the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople. 
But in the year 533 the Emperor Justinian declared the 
Bishop of Rome to be chief of the whole Ecclesiasti- 
cal body of the Empire. In the letter of the Empe- 
ror to the Romish Bishop thus constituted Pope, he 
speaks of his desire to preserve the unity of the Apos- 
tolic Chair, and says, " For we cannot suffer that any- 
thing which relates to the state of the Church, how- 
ever manifest and unquestionable, should be moved, 
without the knowledge of your Holiness, who are the 
Head of the Holy Churches, for in all things, as we 
have already declared, we are anxious to increase the 
honor and authority of your Apostolic Chair." The 
plea of supreme authority derived directly from Peter 
had meanwhile been gaining ground. It seems to 



THE PAPAL SUPREMACY. 21 

have been first advanced about the beginning of the 
fifth century by Innocent, and in the course of a cen- 
tury it grew to be the grand argument for the Pope's 
supremacy, so that in the time of Pope Gelasius it was 
solemnly asserted in a pontifical council, and the claim 
rapidly grew on by degrees, assisted by Imperial edicts, 
of a divine title, primacy, superintendence, supremacy, 
universal and divine power. In the reign of the Em- 
peror Mauritius, the Patriarch of Constantinople as- 
sumed the title of Universal Bishop. This assumption 
incensed beyond all measure the reigning Patriarch of 
Rome, Gregory I. It is one of the most remarkable 
things in all history that this Pontiff declared and 
strenuously maintained that " whosoever assumed that 
heretical, blasphemous, and infernal title, was the fol- 
lower of Lucifer, the forerunner and herald of Anti- 
Christ, in that it neither did nor could belong to any 
bishop whatever." 

The Emperor Mauritius could not be persuaded by 
all Gregory's arguments to enter into his views. Just 
at this time Mauritius was murdered and dethroned by 
an execrably vicious centurion named Phocas, who 
reigned in his stead. To this horrible villain Pope 
Gregory wrote with great applause and flattery, in a 
tumult of joy because Mauritius, whom he regarded as 
his enemy, had been put to death. He applauded 
Phocas and his dreadful crime, in order that he might 
gain his favor against the Patriarch of Constantino- 
ple. Gregory soon died ; but Boniface III., who suc- 
ceeded him, obtained of this Emperor Phocas the 
revocation of the title of Universal Bishop, and the 
perpetual annexation of it to himself and to the Ro- 



22 FIRST LECTURE. 

man See, the Pontiff being vested with the primacy of 
all the bishops of the empire. The Church of Rome, 
in accepting this new dignity and title, fulfilled the 
prophecy of Gregory, who had denounced it, and 
stamped upon herself, according to his opinion, the 
characteristics of vain-glorious, proud, profane, impi- 
ous, execrable, blasphemous, anti-Christian, heretical, 
diabolical, for with all these epithets did Gregory brand 
the pontiff who should assume the title of Uni- 
versal Bishop. Universal Bishop and Vicar of Jesus 
Christ ! This, with its concomitants, was the climax 
and consummation of anti-Christian pride in the Ro- 
mish Hierarchy, and from this event commences the 
rapid growth of the Papacy as the Man of Sin and 
Son of Perdition. This was at the very commence- 
ment of the seventh century, in the year 606. Here, 
then, we pause for the present. 

CORRESPONDING CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Now I wish you to remember that in our sketch 
thus far I have confined myself to the progress of the 
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy raised gradually from the 
primitive Church, and at length, by the supremacy of 
the Roman Pontiff, consummated as the Romish Hie- 
rarchy, and destined to rule, as an ecclesiastical despot- 
ism, for many long dark centuries over the world. It 
is not to be supposed that such a fabric could be reared 
in the government of the Church, without correspond- 
ing enormity of corruption in the doctrines, ceremo- 
nies, and practices of the Church. Accordingly, in 
these first six centuries of Christianity, the greatest 



CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 

abuses, so prevalent in after ages, had appeared, and 
the seeds of others were sown, the seeds of almost all 
possible evils indeed, in the utter corruption of the 
clergy. Leo the Great became the Roman Pontiff in 
the year\440. Under his authority and influence the 
Confessional was established, and in it the conscience of 
the people was delivered over to the power of the 
Priest, and an enormous addition was made to the 
power and influence of the clergy. In his time and 
in that of Gregory, that is, in the period between 400 
and 600, the veneration for martyrs and relics had in- 
creased almost to an established worship, and images 
were introduced into the churches. The institutions 
of Monachism, that great centre and support of the 
wickedness of the Romish court, and power of the 
Pcomish Church for ages, had struck deep. The prac- 
tices of Polytheism itself had been adopted by the 
Church in order to allure the Pagans and barbarians in 
greater crowds into her bosom. The feast days of 
Paganism became the saints' days of Christianity; 
the images of the martyrs supplied the absence of the 
statues of the gods ; the gorgeous dresses and ceremo- 
nies of the priests, the frankincense and the altars, the 
pictures and shrines of this new mythology, it was 
rightly concluded by the Romish clergy, would prove 
to the barbarians and idolaters a rich compensation for 
the renunciation of that grosser and less gorgeous 
polytheism to which their senses had been accustomed. 
Moreover, the sacrament of baptism was supposed to 
contain a full and absolute expiation of sin, and the 
assurance of eternal salvation ; hence there were many 
proselytes,w T ho, though they renounced their idolatry, de- 



24 FIRST LECTURE. 

f erred their baptism, to continue the indulgence of 
their sins, which, by the application of that rite at any 
time before death, they could so easily wash away. 
There can be little doubt that this was one great rea- 
son with Constantine himself for deferring his own 
baptism. a The salvation of the people was purchased 
at an easy rate," says Gibbon, and the sneer is just, 
" if it be true that in one year 12,000 men were bap- 
tized in Rome, besides women and children ; and that 
a white garment, with twenty pieces of gold, had been 
promised by the emperor to every convert." 

It was this religion that the celebrated Pope Grego- 
ry, in the sixth century, sent to Britain, ordering that 
for the accommodation and allurement of the Pagans, 
and to make Christianity sit easy upon them, the days 
on which they had been accustomed to sacrifice to the 
gods should be appointed as festivals of the Saints, 
and so the populace be allowed to bring and kill their 
victims, and perform their sacrifices as usual. The re- 
solute pontiff was determined that thus Satan should 
be cheated, and the souls of the multitude saved ! It 
was this religion of which a Pagan writer remarked 
(Eunapius, quoted in Gibbon), with a sarcasm and un- 
belief not at all to be wondered at, that " instead of 
deities, the heads salted and pickled, of infamous male- 
factors, are the gods which the earth produces in our 
days ; the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our 
prayers and petitions to the deity, whose tombs are 
now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of 
the people." 

I have spoken of the ambition of the clergy, as a 
necessary result growing out of the aggrandizement 



CORRUPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY. 25 

and variety of their offices and titles. We will take 
two instances of this for illustration, both of them oc- 
curring in the See of Rome, but both before that See 
had received the title and supremacy of universal 
Bishop. The first, not long after the conversion of 
Constantine, and the alliance of religion with the 
State, was the horrible conflict between two of the 
clergy, Damasus and Ursinus, nominated and elected 
by opposite partisans to fill the Episcopal chair 
of Rome, about the year 366. The most dreadful 
violence, fightings, burning of buildings and blood- 
shed, took place ; a hundred and thirty-seven persons 
were massacred in the church of Liberius, and the pre- 
fect of the city was compelled to take refuge in the 
suburbs. A pagan and contemporary writer has left 
on record his feelings and thoughts in the observance 
of this w r arfare. 

The second instance is in the year 498, a still more 
terrible and continued conflict between Symmachus, a 
deacon, and Laurentius, an arch presbyter, with their 
respective multitudes of partisans, for the succession to 
the same dignity of the Pontiff of the See of Rome. 
The city was kept in an uproar for months ; there were 
uncontrollable mobs, battles and bloodshed, in the 
streets and public places ; both the pontiffs were ac- 
cused of the most dreadful crimes, and three separate 
councils assembled at Rome w T ere unable to terminate 
the fierce contest. Now w r e beg you to look at the 
picture w T hich such scenes give, the revelation which 
they lay open, of the nature of the prevalent Chris- 
tianity of the times. Suppose for a moment that such 
a conflict should take place in the city of New York 



26 FIRST LECTUR E. 

between two of the clergy chosen to fill a vacant 
bishoprick ; what conclusion would you be justified in 
drawing as to the degree of piety in the Church and 
community 1 



DIVISIONS OF THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT. 

During the period which we have now swept w T ith 
our historical perspective, several great sources of cor- 
ruption and wickedness, several great elements of ty- 
ranny and cruelty, several great engines of ambition 
and misery to the world, were developed and set in 
motion, to be perfected afterwards, and to sweep the 
earth as with an infernal whirlwind, for at least ten 
centuries. They constitute such links in the chain of 
despotism engirding the world, that they must be 
dwelt upon consecutively in our argument, and we 
shall bring all these trains of investigation to bear 
upon our argument as to the nature and consequence 
of the mingling of civil and ecclesiastical power, and 
as to the nature of the Romish despotism as the con- 
summation of such a mixture. 

First, the idea was fixed in men's minds of the 
earthly visible unity and aggrandizement of the 
Church as a kingdom of this world. Second, the 
maxim was established that to lie and deceive be- 
comes a virtue, if religion or the Church can be pro- 
fited by it. Third, the alliance followed between the 
civil and ecclesiastical hierarchies, the union of Church 
and State. Fourth, there followed upon this the em- 
ployment of civil penalties for the compulsion of the 



HISTORICAL ARCUMENT. 27 

conscience in religious things. Fifth, there was com- 
menced the opposition of the Church to the diffusion 
of knowledge and learning. Sixth, the ministry of 
the Church became a sacrificial priesthood, and the 
idea was established to the utter annihilation of the 
great principle of Justification by Faith, that pardon 
of sin could be purchased by money, penance, human 
merit, through the medium of the priest. Seventh, the 
foundations of the Canon law w r ere laid, the body, 
power, and authority of which continued to increase 
as a main support of the Papacy, even up to the six- 
teenth century. It will be found of essential impor- 
tance to trace every one of these abuses, in disclosing 
fully the nature of the mixture of civil and ecclesias- 
tical power in the governments of the middle ages, 
and the means by which the system, formed of such a 
mixture, was supported. We bring up these great 
facts from the past gulf of history, not, be it remem- 
bered, for the facts' sake, or for the sake of dwelling 
upon them, or of elucidating the corruptions of any 
particular Church, but solely for the sake of great prin- 
ciples to be established out of such a survey. We can 
get at such principles only by such a survey, only by 
going thoroughly into past events, in order to under- 
stand the lessons, for the sake of which God permitted 
the events to be developed. In this survey, as w r e pass 
along, the false positions contained in Bishop Hughes's 
lecture will be made manifest. 



2S FIRST LECTURE, 



IDEA OF THE VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT OF 

THE CHURCH. 

I. Our first point, then, is this, namely : the idea settled 
and fixed in the minds of men, of the earthly, visible 
unity and aggrandizement of the Church as a kingdom 
of this world. We must trace this idea and its conse- 
quences somewhat at large. 

As early as the second century w T e find the germ of 
the idea, fully developed in the third century, of a visi- 
ble Catholic Church, beyond the pale of which there 
could be no salvation. In the apostolic times it was 
not said, Except you join the Church you cannot enter 
heaven, but, Except ye repent and believe in the Lord 
Jesus Christ, you cannot enter heaven. But so soon 
as men began to attach importance to the idea of a 
visible Church, within which alone there was salvation, 
then an entrance into the Church came to be consi- 
dered as the cause, instead of the consequence, of a 
personal union to Christ. " He cannot have God for 
his father, who has not the Church for his mother," 
said Cyprian ; an absolute falsehood, when grounded 
on the idea of a visible Church, as alone containing 
salvation. Upon this idea of the visible Catholic 
Church was next grafted the idea of a perfect uniform- 
ity in the creed and observances of that Church. As 
early as the second century the Bishop of Rome con- 
demned the Asiatic Bishops, because they refused to 
conform to the western Churches in the celebration of 
Easter. By and by, when the Church was established 
by law, conformity came to be considered essential to 



VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 29 

its unity, and non-conformity was branded as a crime. 
This was natural. If there be one visible Church, and 
no possibility of salvation out of it, the visibility of that 
Church must consist in its uniformity; every species 
of dissent from its rules or confessions is regarded as a 
schism, to be punished as a crime. Hence, with the 
idea of the visible unity of the Church, comes, of course, 
the restraint and punishment of heresy, the bondage 
of freedom, the fettering of individual opinion. The 
authority of the Church becomes supreme, in matters 
both of faith and practice; and these matters being- 
settled by councils, w T hich councils were councils of the 
Bishops, the way was gradually prepared for re- 
stricting the idea of the Church to the idea of the hie- 
rarchy, the assembly of its officers. " It was not until 
the habit of acting in bodies," says an Episcopal histo- 
rian, before quoted, a made them sensible of their com- 
mon interest and real power, that they ventured to as- 
sert such claims, and assumed a loftier manner in the 
government of their dioceses ; so that, though these 
synods w T ere doubtless indispensable to the well-being 
of Christianity, they seem to have been the means of 
corrupting the original humility of its ministers ; and 
the method which was intended to promote only the 
eternal interests of the Church, promoted in some de- 
gree the worldly consideration of the order which gov- 
erned it This change began to show itself toward the 
end of the second century, and it is certain that at this 
period we find the first complaints of the incipient cor- 
ruptions of the clergy." Those corruptions grew pre- 
cisely with the growth of the idea and the power of 
the Church as a hierarchy. 

It is impossible to say precisely what time the idea 
3 



30 FIRST LECTUaE, 

of the Church was first restricted to the clergy. When 
it was, then ambition became the ruling passion of the 
Church. This restriction you may find in modern 
times, and in the minds of some great writers. Gui- 
zot's idea of the Church and his manner of using the 
word may be learned from one almost casual sentence, 
In speaking of the retirement of religious orders into 
monasteries, he says, these institutions became, during 
this barbarous period, an asylum for the Church, as 
the Church was for the laity. It would seem thus 
that his idea of the Church is confined to the priest- 
hood ; the people form no part of it. But what i9 
the Church of Christ ? Is it not the assembly of the 
souls of his flock 1 Where two or three are met in my 
name, there am I; there is Christ, the Great Shepherd 
and Bishop of his flock. There is the Church of 
Christ, where Christ and his people are, not where 
the clergy alone are. The truth is, the Church is es- 
sential to the being of the clergy, and not the clergy 
to the being of the Clvurch. The clergy come out of 
the Church, and not the Church out of the clergy ; 
and so they are a divine order ; the Church being from 
God, by a new creation of his Spirit, they, as a part 
of the Church, are, according to God's will, through 
the Church and for the Church, a divine order. But 
if they boast themselves against the Church, be it re- 
membered, it is the Church that bears them, and not 
they who bear the Church. They are gifts granted of 
God for the edification of the body of Christ, for his 
body's sake, which is the Church ; but they are not 
the body of Christ, God forbid, but simple members 
of that body, appointed by the Holy Ghost as over- 
seers and teachers. 



VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 31 

A visible body must have a visible head ; and hence 
the progress of this idea of a visible unity to the cli- 
max of the Ecclesiastical hierarchy in a Universal Pon- 
tiff was natural and consistent. When this hierarchy 
was thus completed, it became the greatest enshrine- 
ment of the genius of universal ambition that the 
world ever saw. Ambition was the infecting spirit 
and sin of the Church so organized. Hence in almost 
all the councils of the Church you meet bodies of men 
intriguing, managing, striving, contending, for the 
aggrandizement of their own order, for the consolida- 
tion of Ecclesiastical Empire, not for the good of man- 
kind, not for the spread of the gospel, not for the 
instruction of the multitude. The despotic unity of 
the Church, not the glory of Christ, was the object. 
Even the doctrines of the Church were put into pre- 
cise dogmas, not to edify the Church, or to instruct 
mankind, or to render the knowledge of the gospel 
more accessible, but to render the dominion of the 
Church more absolute, its unity more despotic. To 
repress and punish heretics, and not to teach, win, 
and convert unbelievers, or to build up believers, was 
the work of Ecclesiastical councils for ages. Men 
may say, philosophers may say, that such councils, 
such bodies of men existing through the dark ages, 
and such a Hierarchy called the Christian Church, 
w r ere necessary to keep alive Christianity in the world, 
and that they did keep it alive. We should rather say, 
they kept it dying than living. Instead of being as 
the candlestick, they were as the bushel. The light 
was put under the bed, and the bed, the Church, with 
the light under it, was made a bed of the embraces of 
luxury and power. 



12 FIRST LECTURE. 

The true unity of the Church of Christ is oneness 
of spirit, not of form ; it is union to him, to Christ, and 
the unity which is the consequence of that, not union 
to a hierarchy or form of Church government, and the 
unity which is the consequence of that. The Church 
is put first in the estimation of hierarchists ; belong to 
the Church, they say, and you are united to Christ ; 
the voice of the gospel is very different ; belong to 
Christ, it says, and you are in him united to the true 
Church. Christ himself says, I am the Vine, not, the 
Church is the Vine \ abide in me, not, abide in the 
Church, and let my words abide in you, not, let the 
Church's word abide in you. By this shall all men 
know that ye are my disciples, not, if ye abide under 
one form of government, but, if ye love one another. 
Unity is a very different thing Trom uniformity. Uni- 
formity, generally speaking, is compulsion and dead- 
ness ; unity is life and love. There may be perfect 
uniformity where there is no unity, as, on the other 
hand, there may be perfect unity, where there is very 
little uniform'ty. The unity of uniformity is not what 
our blessed Lord ever commanded, but, the unity of 
the spirit, in the bond of peace. Any other unity than 
this, any unity without it, is a unity of evil, that leads 
inevitably to ambition, aggrandizement, despotic pow- 
er, persecution, cruelty. It is a remorseless unity, 
with the conscience seared as with a hot iron, de- 
structive of all liberty and love. It is a frowning, 
overawing, overshadowing, overwhelming unity, that, 
to sustain and carry out its purposes, confounds the 
eternal distinctions between right and wrong, sanctifies 
guilt and falsehood, does evil that good may come, 
and makes its members the fanatics of superstition and 



VISIBLE UNITY AND AGGRANDIZEMENT. 33 

arbitrary power. Anything' becomes lawful for the 
sake of the Church ; and its members, when proscribed 
by this demon of Church pride and despotism, are 
willing in all things to aggrandize the Church, though 
it be at the, utter sacrifice of all personal independence. 
Nay, the greater this aggrandizement, at whatever 
cost of this nature, the greater the pride of the indi- 
vidual, as a member, though trampled on, of the ag- 
grandized, glorious, worshipped order. 

Now I say, it is this false terrific unity of form and 
establishment, compressing and binding men together 
under it as slaves, instead of Christ's freemen, that 
is at the bottom of all the evil inflicted by the Church 
upon the world. This, I hesitate not to say, is the 
great corruption of Christianity, which for ages made 
the Church not an incarnation and enshrinement of 
goodness, but of -evil; not an instrument of deliverance 
and mercy, but of deeper bondage and pain. It is a 
corruption, the taint whereof exists still ; and still men 
are making baptism the door of regeneration, and the 
Church the door of heaven. It is a corruption, in 
which the simplest rites of Christ's institution for his 
people are made the means of bondage and error to 
the soul. Give to the priest only those two rites 
of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and let him hold 
them as the keys that unlock the brazen gates of this 
vast visibility of power and glory, as the only means 
of admission within the bosom of this tremendous unity, 
through which only the trembling proselyte can enter 
heaven, and you have at once corrupted religion, and 
perverted its very idea in the soul of the worshipper ; 
a perversion absolutely fatal in placing the symbol for 
the thing signified ; and also you have corrupted the 



34 FIRST LECTURE. 

Church from the temple of piety and love, into an 
engine of oppressive, vast, sweeping, resistless am- 
bition and despotism. 

In such a state of things, in such a unity, Christian- 
ity and the Church become distinct and separate. 
Christianity, if it exists, exists apart from the Church, 
as entirely a foreign essence, nay, even as a heresy. 
In the greatest perfection of this unity in the Romish 
Church, when Christianity appeared, then the Church 
crushed it ; when her sweet, mild, holy voice was 
heard, it sounded 'like a lunatic's; it was strange, wild, 
heretical, dangerous ; it must be imprisoned. But reli- 
gion had gone out of this hierarchy from a very early 
period, and the consequence was the repressing and 
preventing the world's mercy, and the continuance of 
the world in darkness for successive ages, in spite of 
the historical existence of the so-called Christian 
Church. The salt having lost its savor, consequently, 
although it was thrown upon the world in this vast 
and splendid unity, yet the world continued to be, 
what it always must be without piety, a dunghill ; and 
a corrupted Christianity did but add to its festering, 
polluted, pestilential ingredients. 



CIVILISATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES. THE ROMISH HIER- 
ARCHY AN OBSTACLE. 

We may judge from this in some measure how scan- 
dalous to true piety it is to attribute to Christianity the 
poor and barbarous civilisation that reigned in the 
world during a large portion of the dark and middle 
ages. The civilisation which would have been pro- 



OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 35 

duced by true Christianity, had been a very different 
and a far more glorious and beneficial advancement of 
the world. But the Romish Church repressed that 
advancement, so that it may be considered doubtful if 
the world would not have made just as great progress 
in mere civilisation, without any Christian Church at 
all. What Guizot calls the history of civilisation 
in modern Europe, is, in point of fact, in many respects 
the history of ambition in modern Europe. It would 
not be difficult to show this ; it would not be difficult 
to show that ambition in its march, both personal and 
corporational, carries with it inevitably a train of civi- 
lisation, and that the civilisation of modern Europe 
before the Reformation was not owing so much to the 
impressible tendency in man towards civilisation, or to 
the benefieial working of benevolent principles, either 
in the Church or out of it, as to the working of self- 
ishness. The most despotic monarch tends towards a 
certain degree of civilisation ; for he will strive to 
make himself, his court, all his own circumstances, as 
glorious and grand as possible. Hence he will draw 
from all sources the elements of luxury, of comfort, of 
splendor, of display, and even of refinement, though it 
may be barbaric refinement ; and in all this there is 
progress towards general civilisation. Perhaps he 
will build cities, like Cain the murderer, and name 
them after the name of his first born son. Perhaps he 
will build pyramids and rear temples out of the super- 
stition and slavery of the people, which shall be re- 
garded in after ages as the material types of a won- 
derful period of civilisation. So a despotic church, in 
seeking the establishment of its own despotic unity^ 
and the aggrandizement of its vast hierarchy, though 



36 F r R S T LEG.T V R E . 

the aim in every member of the order may be purely 
selfish, and neither general civilisation nor general 
happiness be ever thought of as an end, will yet, in 
this very selfishness, tend to the civilisation of man- 
kind- You might take Napoleon as an illustration of 
this principle* There were many good things and 
grand principles that grew out of his whirlwind course, 
noble institutions, and enterprises, and sometimes na- 
tions set at liberty; but no man would dream of say- 
ing that Napoleon's object was the world's happi- 
ness, or the world's civilisation, but on the whole re- 
morseless conquest, of which the good ends that he ac- 
complished were rather heavenly accidents than hu- 
man purposes, God's arrangements and not his own. 
In the prosecution of his great end, the road across 
the Simplon was a vast and noble work, a magnifi- 
cent enterprise, shot through eternal Alps, driven 
where the world might have waited for centuries be- 
fore benevolence or mere civilisation would have driven 
it, through rock galleries sheeted with ice and snow, 
down which avalanches might innocently thunder into 
unfathomable depths below; but still the genius of the 
enterprise was Remorseless Conquest. 

And just so with the dominion of the Popes, the 
march of the Romish hierarchy ; there w r ere many 
good things grew out of it, through God's preventing 
mercy, to the world ; but on the whole its genius was 
Remorseless Conquest. The good things were heaven's 
accidents ; the evil was its character and its essence. 
Nor can there be anything more certain than that, 
during the dark and middle ages, on the whole, the 
happiness of the many, the elevation of society, the 
Christianisation of the common people, nay the rights 



OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 37 

of the common people, were scarcely thought of; 
these things entered not into the views of men ; and 
how should they, as long as what was called the 
Christian Church set the example, and taught the les- 
son to all mankind, of supreme selfishness; the idea 
of laboring for the amelioration or the good of man- 
kind was merged and lost in the ideas either of per- 
sonal or hierarchical aggrandizement. This was what 
the Church pursued with very few individual excep- 
tions. You may bring forward great and good names 
in the darkest period ; Bernard, Bruno, Anselm, Tho- 
mas A'Kempis; but they no more constituted the Ro- 
man Church, or any part of its spirit, or any part of 
its fruits, than Simeon and Anna L die Jewish Temple 
constituted the spirit or the fruits of the proud, corrupt- 
ed, persecuting Jewish hierarchy, abandoned of God 
and given over to destruction. In point of fact, the 
light of such benevolent minds was like lamps in 
sepulchres, shining upon dead men's bones and all un- 
cleanness, but powerless to give them existence, or to 
clear away the pollution, or to make the abodes of 
death and cruelty the habitations of life and mercy. 
Such minds were no more the results or the character- 
istics of the Romish hierarchy, than the magnificent 
cathedrals of the Gothic architecture were the results 
or the proofs of general piety and intelligence. 

God, it is true, counteracts our selfishness. Our 
world would be an open, undisguised hell of wicked- 
ness, if he did not. 

Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do, 
Not light them for themselves. 

Heaven makes even a purely ambitious mind, and a 
3* 



38 FIRST LECTURE. 

purely ambitious hierarchy, in spite of itself, minister 
in many ways to good ; but it is Heaven's idea, not 
ours. So in those ages the idea of Christianity was 
lost sight of in the idea of a vast Ecclesiastical Hierar- 
chy. The Great Invisible Head of the Church was 
displaced first by the Church, and then for many ages 
by its self-constituted earthly Head, the Supreme Pon- 
tiff usurping the place of the Heavenly. The object 
before all men's minds was Power. With the Priests, 
it was power on earth and in heaven ; power on earth 
by means of power in heaven ; power over men's 
minds, bodies, possessions, by power of their con- 
sciences. Gain the conscience, and you gain the 
world ; power supre'liife on earth followed men's belief 
in a power to shut out from Heaven. Well did the 
Priests know this. 

For, give you but a foot of conscience there, 
And you, like Archimedes, toss the globe. 

With kings, emperors, and barons, it was pow T er on 
earth, dominion, authority, the great lust of th v e fallen 
archangel, and of fallen man — Power, uncontrolled, un- 
shackled Power. Alfred the Great, our Alfred, was a 
wonderful exception, but almost solitary. Charle- 
magne was somewhat an exception ; but the character 
of Charlemagne was far more that of personal ambi- 
tion than Alfred's ; and in the measures of that great 
mind you see but a larger and more liberal sweep, 
than smaller minds could accomplish, of the ideas of 
conquest and consolidated empire. This must draw 
civilisation with it, but mark you, civilisation in spite 
of it, civilisation as an accident and not an object. 



OBSTACLE TO CIVILISATION. 39 

Just so with the crusades, enlarged upon in some 
quarters, almost as if it were a benefit conferred upon 
the world by the Papacy ! Singular delusion ! Civili- 
sation did indeed grow out of the crusades, but again 
I say, in spite of the purpose of them ; as an accident 
of Heaven's mercy, and not an object of man's inten- 
tion ; as a result thrown in by that glorious preroga- 
tive of God, by which he brings good out of evil, and 
is ever making the wrath of man to praise Him. So 
man and hierarchies go on, taking their great strides 
of ambition, and God in spite of them makes great 
general good to grow even out of their evil movements. 
So men mingle the cup of misery for the multitude in 
the accomplishment of their purposes, but God throws 
even into the very dregs of the cup the elements of 
some after result for his own glory and man's good. 

The generalizing sophistry of scholars may wear the 
appearance, and gain the reputation, of originality, 
in rinding out and illustrating the uses of abuses ; but 
they should be careful to distinguish between the 
essence and aim of an abuse, and the good result which 
in God's providence may spring out of it. Some men 
allow themselves to talk of the blessings of the Papacy 
in such and such directions ; how, for example, it 
restrained the power of kings, and preserved the records 
of Christianity. But mark you, if it had not risen to 
that enormous despotism in itself which could restrain 
the power of kings, the pure influences of the gospel 
would have restrained that power, and regulated it for 
the people's good, long before ; the pure influences of 
the gospel would have prevented the need of the inter- 
position of the vast machinery of an Ecclesiastical 
Despotism. And if, instead of keeping the records of 



40 FIRST LECTUKE. 

Christianity hidden during the period of the world's 
ignorance and darkness, and thus preserving them in 
monastic cobwebs, the papacy, and the monasteries, 
and the monks had spread them before the people as 
humble teachers, that ignorance and darkness would 
have been dissipated. Preserving the truths and records 
of Christianity in a dark age by hiding them ! Tt is 
just as if you should say, having only one solitary lamp 
lighted in the world, we will, instead of lighting other 
lamps by it, put it in a vault, and keep it till the night 
is passed, lest the darkness destroy it. And we w T ill 
make the world believe that all the light in the world 
is in our power ; and that on penalty of eternal death 
men must go nowhere else for light but to our dun- 
geons, and thus we will keep the world in subjection. 
So the Papacy preserved Christianity not for the world 
but from the world. 

The Church was a vast Hierarchy, a form of power, 
an incarnation, not of Christianity, but of conquest. 
But your generalizes will say that civilisation was 
progressing, and the Church was a means of this pro- 
gression. Again I will tell you how. Christianity 
was as a germ, a germ both of civilisation and piety, 
thrown into the world, deposited in the earth to grow 
there. As it was growing, the Hierarchical Church 
was thrown upon it as a mountain, a hierarchy, a great 
rock of worldly ambition. What becomes of the 
germ ? It cannot die ; it lives, it struggles, it shoots 
this way and that way, it heaves the mountain ; at 
length, through Heaven's mercy, it meets a cleft, and 
up it rises, forcing itself through the fissure, up to the 
topmost surface, to the open air ; and then and there, 
with unabated vigor and freshness of life, it spreads 



HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 41 

and grows, till the whole surface is covered with rich 
mould and verdure, and the tree shoots up to heaven. 
Now a historian or a sophist, who comes and tells me 
that this mould, and this verdure, and this magnificent 
tree are the offspring of the Romish Church, may 
easily be confounded ; for with my spade I can show 
the hard rock, and the cleft through which Christianity, 
repressed for ages, did at length regain its liberty, and 
grew and spread, and covered the earth with verdure, 
in spite of the Romish Hierarchy. 

FALSEHOOD OF THE POSITION THAT THE HIERARCHY WAS 
NECESSARY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

But nevertheless, answers our original scholar, this 
Hierarchy, this Papacy, this mountain, as you call it, 
was very useful in shielding that germ of Christianity 
from the storms and fires that swept over the world 
during those ages. Just as a Bastile hides, and thus 
preserves its prisoner. This germ of Christianity was 
preserved from growth, not from destruction. It is one 
of the falsest of all positions to suppose, that had not 
the Christian Church existed as a hierarchy in the 
fourth and fifth centuries, religion would have been 
swept from the world. And yet this position is in some 
measure assumed, even by Guizot, and ecclesiastical 
historians have not disdained to follow it, and to assert, 
to the base betrayal of our faith, or rather, to the slan- 
der of its inherent divine energy, that under a less vi- 
gorous form of human government, religion would 
have perished from the world. This is, absolutely, 
making the corruptions of Christianity essential to its 
existence, " The overweening authority claimed and 



42 FIRST LECTURE. 

exercised by the clergy/ 5 says Milman, " their exist- 
ence as a separate and exclusive caste, at this particu- 
lar period in the progress of civilisation, became of the 
highest utility. A religion without a powerful and 
separate sacerdotal order, even perhaps if that order 
had not in general been bound to celibacy, and so pre- 
vented from degenerating into an hereditary caste, 
would have been absorbed and lost in the conflict and 
confusion of the times. Religion, unless invested by 
general opinion in high authority, and that authority 
asserted by an active and incorporated class, would 
scarcely have struggled through this complete disor- 
ganisation of all the existing relations of society." 
Open the New Testament, and place yourself in the 
blaze of its light, and such speculations as these must 
be viewed with indignation and contempt. It is then 
the opinion of Mr. Milman that Christ is incompetent 
to keep his Church in existence, when barbarians in- 
vade the country, unless it be in the form of a hierar- 
chy, supported by human authority and power. I can 
trace such sentiments to nothing else but the habit of 
dependence and w r orldliness, produced in an Established 
Church by always looking to the State for protection ; 
such a mind is incapable of producing a free and noble 
Ecclesiastical History, because it never sees the true, 
independent glory of the Gospel. It supposes that the 
Church must sink to destruction the moment the State 
withdraws from its allegiance, and that Christianity 
must go to ruin, if the State on which it has been ac- 
customed to lean, be overturned. 

Just so, an historian of a better spirit of faith in the 
divine hand, nevertheless is not ashamed to say that 
Christianity itself would have been swept away from 



HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 43 

the surface of the west, had it not been rescued by an 
established body of ministers with splendid ceremonies. 
" Thence resulted the gradual conversion of the inva- 
ders/' says Mr. Waddington, " by the agency of the 
visible Church. Without those means, had Christianity 
then existed as a mere individual belief, or even under 
a less vigorous form of human government, the reli- 
gious society would have possessed neither the energy 
nor the discipline necessary for resistance to the deluge 
which endangered it." A worldly mind, that has no 
faith in the divine origin and power of Christianity, 
might have broached such speculations ; and yet, such 
a mind might be asked how it was that Christianity 
without any hierarchy, or imposing ceremonial, or gov- 
ernment established by law — 'Christianity in its primitive 
loveliness and simplicity, was kept from being swept 
from the earth when the whole power of the Roman 
Empire was at work to exterminate and crush it ? But 
that a Christian mind should yield itself to such views 
is almost inconceivable. 

It is moreover to be remembered, that the so-called 
conversion of the invading tribes in the fifth century, 
was merely a nominal transfer from a Pagan to a 
Christian polytheism. When, therefore, it is said that 
it was the Church hierarchy which preserved religion 
in the world, we hesitate not to affirm that it was 
rather the superstition of the barbarians themselves 
which sustained and added power to that hierarchy. 
They had been accustomed to pay the most awful 
reverence to their own priests ; they simply transferred 
this reverence to the Romish hierarchy. They found in 
existence a spiritual authority so like in its pretensions 
to that to which they had been accustomed, that in 



44 FIRST LECTURE. 

which, as in an iron mould, their childhood had been 
rocked ; and by which, as by an iron frame, the growth 
of intellect and soul had been shaped and imprisoned, 
that they bowed before it as before the vision of their 
native deities. An impulse came upon them like that 
under which the Indian idolators, when they stood be- 
fore those frowning rocky temples of Egypt, pros- 
trated themselves in adoration, exclaiming that they 
had found the gods of their own country. It was the 
awful genius of superstition that froze into subjection 
the souls of those northern conquerors, rather than any 
influences of civilisation and Christianity, that melted 
them. It was the spell of Druidism, which Christianity 
would have broken, and supplied its place with love, 
but with which, as an element of their own existence, 
they invested the new hierarchical order and ceremo- 
nial to which they were introduced — an order and cere- 
monial surrounded with so much more of imposing 
grandeur than they had ever known, and yet having 
so many features of the priestly dominion under which 
they had been educated, that it seemed as if they did 
but bow before their own native religion, in a new 
form of power and glory. 

Now when such writers become so forgetful of the 
nature and support of true Christianity as to say that 
those Northern masses of Barbarians, had it not been 
for the Romish Church, would have obliterated all 
vestiges of religion and of learning from the world, we 
must be permitted to say that if the Church as it then 
was, could have been annihilated, and a new begin- 
ning have been made in the planting of Christianity as 
it issued from the charge of the Apostles, religion and 
learning would have soon transformed those Barbari- 



HIERARCHY NOT CHRISTIANITY. 45 

ans into Christians and cultivated men. If when those 
Northern warriors overran the Roman Empire, there 
had been in existence only one simple Church of Christ 
in "all the world; if, by the determination of the Author 
of our religion, that religion had been restricted to one 
single Church in Jerusalem for the space of five hun- 
dred years ; and if the period for its propagation had 
been detained and appointed at the very juncture 
when the fountains of the great deep of Northern 
savageism were broken up, and Huns, Vandals, Goths, 
Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and all of Odin's brood from 
the ice womb of Empire had poured over the w r orld ; 
you may be sure that one single primitive Church, with 
the Papal Hierarchy out of the way, would have done 
more for the conversion of these men and the world, 
more for the good of the World in one single century, 
more to fill the world with the blessings and institu- 
tions of civilisation and Christianity, than the Romish 
Church accomplished for the space of nine hundred 
years. The ark of that single simple Church would 
have floated upon the face of that deluge, and w 7 hen it 
subsided, its inmates would have covered the earth 
with the garden of the Lord. There were elements 
of character in those floods of Northern savages admi- 
rably fitted to unite with and be moulded by the noblest, 
simplest, most vigorous elements of the Christian reli- 
gion. But the Romish Church, instead of converting 
those savages, corrupted them, corrupted their very 
virtues by the corruptions of Christianity ! Instead of 
leading them into the fold of Christ, it received them 
into the lap of the consolidated empire of those cor- 
ruptions, the vast personification of w r hich towers be- 
fore us, in the tremendous imagery of scripture, as at 
once the Mother of Harlots and the Man of Sin ! 



46 FIRST LECTURE 



PIOUS LYING FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHURCH. 

II. We pass to our next division in the historical 
argument, which is the maxim that falsehood is justi- 
fiable in behalf of the Church. This became a most 
important element in the mixture of civil and ecclesi- 
astical power in the middle ages, and a great reliance 
and support of the Romish Hierarchy ; one of its dark- 
est, frowning, w T eather-beaten buttresses. 

The maxim that to lie and deceive becomes a virtue 
if religion or the Church can be profited by it, is 
to be traced to a very early period. Its introduction 
does not lie at the door of the Romish Church, though 
its adoption, sanction, use and establishment, are hers* 
You find the seeds of it in the second century, scattered 
into the Christian garden from those flowers of heathen 
philosophy, of which the Fathers were so fond, that 
they would mingle them with the healthful blooming 
truths gathered from the field of the New Testament. 
The Pagan Philosophers were accustomed to affix to 
their works some name of authority to give weight to 
their own speculations ; and impostures of the same 
kind were resorted to and patronized in the Christian 
Church, on the diabolical principle that truth may be 
defended by falsehood, to such an extent that it is 
utterly impossible to trust the writings of many 
of the early Fathers. Forgeries, doubtful statements, 
interpolations and direct falsehoods, became so com- 
mon, that you are afloat on a sea of uncertainty ; 
one thing, however, is certain, that pious frauds were 
sanctioned by the Church, and lying was adopted as a 
virtue. Eusebius, Bishop of Cesarea about the year 



PI OU S LYING. 47 

315, and who died about the year 340, distinctly treats^ 
in one of his chapters, the following theological propo- 
sition, namely, How it may be lawful and fitting to 
use falsehood as a medicine, for the advantage of those 
who require such a method. You may well suppose 
how this business of pious frauds so sanctioned, would 
thrive as an element in the corruptions of Christianity. 
The multitude of sick persons who required falsehood 
as a medicine seemed greatly to increase, nor was it at 
all the homoeopathic principle on which the medicine 
was administered. 

Here was Paul's category in perfection ; speaking 
lies in hypocrisy, having the conscience seared as with 
a hot iron. It was the hypocrisy of benefiting the 
Church ; and the conscience, particular and universal, 
became so seared, that lying in this sort became an 
element of prosperous ecclesiastical existence. To 
this source you may trace the interminable catalogue 
of false miracles, astounding legends, absurd stories of 
saints and martyrs, coined and distributed with prolific 
ingenuity, which perhaps even in the pages of a pious 
man like Bede, you need not be at the trouble to sup- 
pose the writers of them believed, such pious lies being 
deemed perfectly justifiable ; so that if a man dug up 
the scull of a hippopotamus he might sell it piecemeal 
as the true head of Peter which had been growing un- 
der ground for the use of the faithful ever since the 
apostle's martyrdom. No language can describe the 
infinite superstition and absurdity of the passion for 
rotten bodies, bones, relics and miracles, with which, 
under the fostering care of this diabolical maxim, the 
w r orld became absolutely mad. In those days, says 
Jortin, the bones of a martyr had as little rest as a dog 



48 FIRST LECTURE. 

in a wheel. If this lying spirit had been restricted to 
false miracles and the manufacture of saints' heads 
and martyrs' bones, it had been comparatively harm- 
less ; but it infected the whole existence of the 
Church. U A curious and critical examiner of the 
actions and writings of the most eminent and pious 
doctors of this age," says Jortin, and the same thing is 
asserted by Mosheim, " will, I fear, find almost all of 
them infected with this leprosy, not excepting Am- 
brose, or Hilary, or Augustine, or Gregory Nazianzen, 
or Jerome." But the point we are now particularly 
concerned with is the immediate connection of this 
maxim and spirit and consolidation of the Romish 
Despotism, and its existence as a know T n feature in the 
Romish Church. I might bring up a host of witnesses 
from the past, but omitting minor instances, I strike at 
once upon a great, well known-illustration of this 
matter. You have all heard of the Pope's Decretals, 
which, together with the forgery of the Donation of 
Constantine, of which 1 shall have occasion to speak, 
are justly described as the most celebrated monuments 
of human imposition and credulity. 

In this place, ] shall give you the description of 
them principally in the words of Mosheim. About 
the beginning of the ninth century, the Roman Pontiffs 
procured the forgery, by their trusty friends, of con- 
ventions, acts of councils, epistles, and other docu- 
ments, by which they might make it appear that from 
the earliest ages of the Church the Roman Pontiffs 
possessed the same authority and power, which at that 
dark period they claimed. Among these fraudulent 
supports of the Romish despotism, the so-called De- 
cretal Epistles of the pontiffs of the first centuries hold 



PIOUS LYING. 49 

perhaps the first rank. Of similar authority aud value 
are the decrees of a Roman council, said to have been 
held under Sylvester in the year 324, but which was 
never known of by any one till the ninth century, 
than which nothing could be better suited to enrich 
and exalt above all human authority, the Roman Pon- 
tiff. In the darkness of the world there scarce re- 
mained any one either capable or disposed to move 
controversy respecting these pious frauds; and the 
history of subsequent centuries shows the use made of 
them for uniting all power, temporal and spiritual, in 
the Romish See ; a thing not denied at the present day 
by respectable and honest men, even though friendly 
to the Romish Pontiff. 

I might have gone more minutely into this division 
of our subject, and have taken other historians to de- 
scribe this curious matter ; I might have referred you 
to Fleury, the Romish ecclesiastical historian, or to 
David Blondell, or to Ayliffe's very admirable intro- 
duction to his great work on Canon law ; but I have 
chosen to take nearly the words of Mosheim, whose 
honesty and accuracy no man dare impeach. 

I shall of necessity touch upon this subject again, in 
speaking of the body and power of the canon law ; a 
most instructive investigation ; but sufficient has now 
been said to show how forgeries and falsehoods on a 
vast scale were used in the middle as;es to bind civil 
and ecclesiastical authority in one, and to shore up and 
consolidate the despotism thus formed. In the immense 
labor of examining and comparing the several edi- 
tions of the Justinian Code, the learned Ayliffe found 
in the first book alone, not less than one hundred and 
seven private interpolations of the clergy in favor 



60 FIRST LECTURE. 

of themselves, to increase their own power and 
authority. 

Now on the general topic of concealment, as well 
as lying, in the Romish Church, the declaration haz- 
arded by Bishop Hughes is one of the most astounding 
we ever heard uttered in the teeth of truth. To say 
that it is the genius of the Romish Church to conceal 
nothing of her doctrines or her history, is much the 
same as if you should say that it is the genius of fire 
not to burn, or of the thick clouds not to veil the light. 
I shall not open the pit of abominations in the casuis- 
try of the Jesuits ; I shall not detail the catalogue of 
crimes and perjuries, absolved and pardoned before- 
hand ; the dispensation to assume any heretical reli- 
gion for the advancement of the Church's interest. 
On the general topic of concealment in the Romish 
Church, it might be sufficient to say that an ecclesiasti- 
cal system, which admits the policy and propriety of 
direct lies in its support, must a fortiori use the less ob- 
noxious stratagem of concealment, as is well known 
hath always been the custom, whenever occasion de- 
manded it. " It is very well known," says Peter Ju- 
rieu, " that the court of Rome, being governed by the 
most refined politics, makes no collection of pieces 
that may prove hurtful or dangerous to itself; or if any 
such were, would not, however, permit them to be 
made public." Hence, the eminent historian Ranke 
could not obtain admission to the records of the Vati- 
can for the abundant materials there gathered for a 
history of the Popes. The Cardinal Pallavicini in his 
history of the Council of Trent, confesses that the Ro- 
mish Church mixes in her conduct carnal and worldly 
policy; that her present government is framed by the 






PIOUS LYING. 51 

rules of this world, and that this is according to the 
intention of Christ. That it is not God's intent to root 
out of our minds our natural inclinations ; men are 
naturally fond of pleasure, wealth and honor, and 
averse from poverty ; and it is fit to accommodate the 
laws and form the Church according to these inclina- 
tions, and that it is a maxim not absolutely true that 
evil is not to be suffered, to the end that good may 
come of it. Under the head of opposition to learning 
this topic will receive additional illustration. I need 
not go to the pages of history to confute Bishop Hughes' 
positioa as to the genius of concealment in the Romish 
Church ; that Church, even in our own country has 
done it abundantly already ; and I only wonder at the 
boldness of such a position, when I remember the 
process of expurgation resorted to in the school-books 
of the public schools in this city ; the expurgation of 
all passages and lessons, though of an historical accu- 
racy beyond question, which recorded any facts or sen- 
timents illustrative of sin or error in the Romish Church. 
I hold in my hand one of these blackened ^nd expur- 
gated school-books ; and I ask you if this midnight 
page is evidence of a disposition to conceal nothing in 
the doctrines or the history of the Church ? Perhaps 
this page is intended for the minds of the boys and 
girls as a symbol of the fearless and open diffusion of 
knowledge. You see that by means of a lavish use 
of printer's ink, the types are, as the printers would 
say, thrown into pi ; now whether it is the genius of 
concealment, or the genius of truth, that has had a 
finger in this pie, I leave you to judge for yourselves. 
But perhaps you will ask, What is the nature of the 
disastrous lesson which it was thought necessary to 



52 FIRST LECTURE. 

conceal from the minds of the children ? It is simply 
the character of Martin Luther, from the pen of the 
great historian, Dr. Robertson. 

Pass on a few pages farther, and you find two leaves 
immutably stuck together. Perhaps this is designed 
for the minds of the children as a symbol of the union 
of Church and State, and how difficult it is, not to say 
impossible, when they once come together, to pluck 
them asunder ; for you see it is impossible to get these 
two leaves apart, and in point of fact it is the use of 
civil law enforcing Church opinion that hath stuck 
them together. But what is the lesson so ignobly im- 
prisoned between them, and which the genius of a sys- 
tem that hath nothing to conceal, has thought fit to 
shut out with a brush of paste from the light for ever 1 
Ah, if Rome had never employed anything but paste 
brushes and printer's ink against the truth, this lesson 
would have had no existence, no need of expunging. 
It is the historian Hume's account of the character and 
martyrdom of Archbishop Cranmer ! Perhaps, since 
Bishop Hughes avers that Rome disavows the union of 
Church and State, the sticking together of these two 
leaves is an emblem of the manner in which that union 
operates to keep the light from the people. Turn we 
now a few pages farther, and what have we here under 
the blanket of darkness, as Shakspeare might call it ? 
It is a passage in the speech of the Earl of Chatham, 
in which there is the occurrence of the phrase, Popish 
cruelties. Now it is not the genius of the Romish 
Church to conceal anything of her doctrines or her 
history ; and perhaps this blot in the page, making 
such an impassable gulf in the stream of Lord Chat- 
ham's eloquence, is an emblem of the evil consequen- 



r» I V 6 L Y 1 N G . 53 

lies of schism in splitting and destroying the unity of 
the Church. But all this is plain prose ; let us see the 
effect of the genius of fearless non*concealment upon 
poetry. Here is a sweet lesson from that sweet poem 
" The Traveller," by the poet Goldsmith ; he is de- 
scribing the beautiful scenery and the people of Italy, 
and it is in this poem, you remember, that he says that 
man seems the only growth that dwindles there ; but 
that is not one of the lines blotted out ; that has no- 
thing about the Church or the Pope, or the church 
ceremonies in it. The lines are as follows : 

Though grave, yet trifling ; zealous, yet untrue ; 
And e'en in penance planning sins anew. 

Now really this crusade of sectarian expurgation 
against these poor inoffensive school-books is such 
a laughable freak of intolerance and folly, that it is 
almost impossible to make a serious business of it 
There is but one thing more wonderful than the 
folly, and that is, that such an insult upon the good 
sense, the liberality, the noble public spirit, and the 
freedom and fearlessness of truth, which have here- 
tofore marked the people and the schools of this 
city, should have been suffered to be perpetrated. 

Where were the Protestant Trustees of our Schools, 
or rather where was the precious material of common 
sense and an enlightened conscience, that men could 
lend themselves to the adoption of such a measure ? 
What a laughing-stock, or object of suspicious wonder, 
was presented in these mutilated pages to the minds of 
the children ! And if you say that a new edition gf 
the school book, omitting the blackened passages en- 
tirely, is now placed in the schools, this does not mend 
4 



54 FIRST LEGTUR E. 

the matter at all. It is a singular state of things in- 
deed, when a book that has received the approbation 
of all sects, and been used for years without fault in 
the schools throughout the nation, is to be interdicted in 
this city, and an expurgated edition prepared purpose- 
ly to meet the caprices of sectarian prejudice. If the 
genius of Romanism may come in to expunge and con- 
ceal whatever is not accordant with its notions, so may 
every other sect that may be represented in the ten 
thousand varying shades of opinion in the families of 
this city. If this 'be the case, put up your painting in 
some public square, and invite every interested indi- 
vidual to come and set a black mark upon that shade 
or feature in it, which does not suit either his own fan- 
cies or the caprices of his priest; and then let the 
painting so impartially daubed by the genius of uni- 
versal sectarianism, be engraved and stereotyped for 
the discipline and instruction of your children. 

The maxim that to lie and deceive becomes a duty 
in the service of the Church, hath been at the founda- 
tion of the vastest acts of perfidy performed during the 
middle ages. The Popes acted upon it when they as- 
serted the claims of St. Peter, and when they released 
men from all obligations to keep their promises to here- 
tics. The Councils acted upon it, when, as in the 
case of John Huss, they excommunicated and delivered 
over to the secular arm to be burned, those whose safe- 
ty had been promised. Both by Popes and Councils 
all moral obligations were confounded and dissolved. 
If a debt were contracted to heretics, there was no ob- 
ligation to pay it ; pity but the State of Mississippi had 
lived in those blessed days ! With what perfect ease 
and freedom she might have thrown herself back 



PIOUS LYING. 55 

upon the past decisions of the Church, and told her 
creditors, You are all heretics, and we owe you 
nothing; for repudiation towards heretics is piety to 
the Church. " Fanaticism, 55 remarks Mr. Prescott in 
his history of Ferdinand and Isabella, " is so far sub- 
versive of the most established principles of morality, 
that, under the dangerous maxim, ' For the advance- 
ment of the faith, all means are lawful,' which Tasso 
has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly derived from 
the spirits of hell, it not only excuses, but enjoins the 
commission of the most revolting crimes as a sacred 
duty.' 5 " Be assured," said Pope Martin V., " that 
thou sinnest mortally, if thou keep thy faith with here- 
tics." " Be it known," said Pope Gregory IX., " to 
all w T ho are under the jurisdiction of those, who have 
openly fallen into heresy, that they are free from the 
obligations of fidelity, dominion, and every kind of obe- 
dience to them by whatever bond or means they are 
tied to them, and how securely soever they may be 
bound." " Justly therefore," remarked a Romish 
Bishop, u were some heretics burnt by the most so- 
lemn judgment of the Council of Constance, although 
they had been promised security." The Council of 
Constance itself declared that heretics w T ho had come 
under a safe conduct, should, notwithstanding, be pun- 
ished, and that whoever had given the safe conduct 
should not be obliged to keep his promise. So John 
Huss, coming to the Council under a safe conduct from 
the Emperor, was condemned to the stake and publicly 
burnt. Now if the Romanists in this country w 7 ish to 
strike out this historical fact from the school books of 
our children, it is like tearing down one of the warning 
beacons on a ledge of rocks in the highway of the ocean. 
Our next topic in the course of this investigation 



56 FIRST LEO T U R E. 

will be the nature and consequences of the union of 
Church and State, in the employment of civil penal- 
ties for the compulsion of the conscience in religious 
things. This perhaps will be the most interesting part 
of our investigation, involving as it does the nature of 
religious liberty, the course which religious hierarchies 
have taken against it, and manifesting more tangibly, 
as we shall be able to do, the precise mixture of civil 
and ecclesiastical power in the middle ages, in the 
manner in which it was felt by the people. We shall 
see the monarchical tendencies of Popery, and its op- 
position to republicanism. We shall have occasion to 
trace distinctly the origin, nature and exercise of the 
dreadful power of excommunication. Our subject will 
take us into the literature of the middle ages, and we 
shall have occasion to look upon the great faces both 
of Chaucer and Dante. We shall see the structure of 
that curious body of scholastic learning, the canon law, 
and we shall see how religious truth could live, and yet 
be kept perfectly distinct from any influence whatever 
on the conduct. 

LESSONS FROM OUR REVIEW, 

And now 1 shall close with an enumeration of 
some of the lessons taught, and to be taught, in our 
review. I think we see distinctly the dreadful conse- 
quences of a disparity in the clergy, the inevitable 
strife, ambition, and persecution, growing out of the 
creation of hierarchical dignities and dignitaries, ris- 
ing one above another, with an accompanying corrup- 
tion of the clergy, till like a worldly Babel they pierce 
the skies, and bring down the lightning of heaven. 
I think we see also, as we shall develope more 
fully in the next lecture, the dreadful consequences of 



LESSONS FROM OUR REVIEW. 57 

mingling the temporal and spiritual authority, and the 
necessity of guarding against all approximation to the 
same. If in this country one particular sect should 
get the patronage of the State to the exclusion of 
others; if those religious offices in the power of the 
government, such as the chaplaincies of our Navy, 
and of our military schools and establishments, should 
be so bestowed as to favor a particular sect, this would 
be an approximation to a state religion ; and the be- 
stowment of favors in any State is never very far sepa- 
rated from the infliction of penalties. I think we also 
see very clearly the universality and disastrous conse- 
quences of the lust of power, and how infinitely worse 
it is in the souls of Ecclesiastics than in Seculars. It 
invades and usurps God's province in the conscience. 
I do not now think of any monarch or State that ever, 
if not urged by ecclesiastical councils or influences, 
burnt a man to death even for the most atrocious 
crimes ; I say, I do not think of any instance, though 
such may be produced ; but the moment an Ecclesias- 
tic becomes inflamed with ambition, he seems to take 
naturally to the fire, and in the midst of it he places 
his victim, though the only crime is a difference of 
religious opinion. I think it is clear also that it is 
much more safe for the liberties of mankind that there 
should be divers religious sects watching one another, 
than that terrible overwhelming unity, which crushes 
all heresies by power, and all liberty of opinion with 
them. Better it were that every Christian should be 
in himself a separate sect, than the Church of Christ 
a compulsory Despotism. It was indeed this remorse- 
less, despotic, persecuting unity to which our blessed 
Lord himself was sacrificed, to prevent a schism in the 
4* 



58 FIRST LECTURE. 

Jewish Church. But under whatever form, save that 
of love to Christ, and a participation in his Spirit, this 
unity is vaunted, it becomes an unhallowed, worldly, 
vain, ambitious boast. 

By this it came about that men came to be called 
Church-men rather than Christ's-men, rather than 
Christians. It was this conversion of the Church into 
a great lordly Hierarchy, instead of a kingdom not of 
this world. By this change Christ is displaced by the 
Church ; this great figment of unity and aggrandize- 
ment, the Church 5 occupies that place in men's minds 
which Christ alone should occupy ; the glory of the 
Church and the power of the Church come to be quite 
another thing than Christ meant should constitute the 
honor of his kingdom. The glory of the Church and 
the power of the Church are sought, not as a means of 
honoring Christ, and spreading the blessings of his 
salvation, but as a means of worldly distinction and 
aggrandizement. Nothing can be clearer than this, 
that the glory with which Christ would clothe his 
Church on earth is not that of title, distinction, splen- 
dor, grandeur, power, hierarchical unity, but that of 
adding to it continually such as should be saved. It 
is the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, which 
Christ has made requisite, a unity w T hereby every joint 
in the whole body compacted together maketh and 
ministereth increase and strength in the spirit of love. 
It is the violation and destruction of this unity, it is 
genuine schism and division, when one party of be- 
lievers, distinguished by some self-erected and conse- 
crated sign, says to another party that will not assume 
that sign, You are not of the true Church. It is just 
as if the hand should say to the foot, Because thou art 
not the hand, therefore thou art not qf the body. 



UNCHURCHING MAXIMS. 59 

By God's great mercy we have in this country, un- 
til of late, been perfectly free from the stir and bluster 
of these unchurching maxims, although it was the 
brutum fulmen, no bishop no church, that drove our 
forefathers from Europe. And now you may think it 
strange that we hate so bitterly this sleeping assump- 
tion. But we know its fruits. It is a pithy proverb, 
A^burnt child dreads the fire. You may say it is 
harmless. Yes, at present it is a harmless insult ; but 
it has the capacity of persecution, and we cannot abide 
it, even sleeping. A black snake, a cobra capella, 
stiffened with the cold, is harmless ; but that is no 
reason why we should have such venomous reptiles at 
the door-posts of our houses. By and by, when the 
sun shines on them, they will creep into our parlors, 
they will hide beneath our pillows, they will sting us 
while we sleep. 

One would have thought, if a badge of exclusion 
must be taken, a shibboleth that would debar from the 
Christian name and privileges all who could not or 
would not pronounce it, it would have been either some 
doctrine clearly revealed in the New Testament, or, if 
a matter of discipline and government, some point set 
forth as clearly. Now instead of this, to take an eccle- 
siastical dignity and dignitary, such as men of all par- 
ties acknowledge is not to be found in the New Testa- 
ment, nor even in the whole first century of Christian- 
ity, and to make the possession or acknowledgment of 
that dignity essential to the name and essence of a 
Christian Church, and consequently to the name and 
privileges of a Christian, is an assumption of arrogance 
and bigotry, of which the bare statement, one would 
think, is sufficient to show the intrinsic wickedness and 



60 FIRST LECTURE. 

absurdity. And yet, such is the arrogance of those, 
who pretend that a diocesan bishop is essential to the 
existence of a Christian Church. They take that which 
is not to be found in the divine constitution of the 
church by Christ and his Apostles, and breaking off 
the signets with which the Saviour hath sealed the as- 
semblies of his people, as branches of the True Vine, 
they affix a seal of their own invention, and thereupon 
and thereto attach the bull of excommunication to 
those who abide by Christ's signet and reject theirs. 
The men who resisted these pretensions in the face of 
rigorous penalties and of death itself, and who fled to 
this country for freedom to worship God, were, as has 
been powerfully delineated in a late magnificent ora- 
tion, a lofty, a heroic race; and now to revive those 
pretensions would be to revive in theory the very intol- 
erance from which our noble forefathers fled into the 
wilderness. It is to execute a bill of attainder on them, 
their principles, and their memories ; it is for us, here 
in this land, the plenty and the blessings of which we 
reap as the fruit of their unbending integrity of con- 
science, to enact, in reference to their character, the 
same unchurching, intolerant proscription, which drove 
their bodies out of England. 



THE NOBLENESS AND SACREDNESS OF OUR ANCESTRAL 

REPUTATION. 

And we may ask, where in all the world hath it 
been known that a nation hath thrown scurrility and 
contempt on the virtues of its ancestry ? Men have 
often feigned an ancestral origin more glorious and 
more virtuous than it really w r as; the ancient Greeks 



OUR NOBLE ANCESTRY. 61 

would enshrine heroes as demi-gods, and common ad- 
venturers as heroes, when these stood at the fountain 
and birth of states and empires ; and ever after, as the 
stream grew wider and farther from its source, they 
made that source more honorable and glorious ; they 
magnified it in fable, ennobled it in history, surrounded 
it with the flame of undying poetry; but never hath 
the living stream of a nation's existence turned back to 
cast reproach upon its mountain origin. And here in 
this republic, for any party to do this, in regard to the 
noble principles and virtues of our Puritan Ancestors, 
is a piece of base recreancy, that every man who has a 
spark of patriotism in his being, must ineffably scorn. 
The party influences, or the sectarian religious influen- 
ces, that could induce men so to belie the noble part of 
their nature, are a gangrene in our system, which if it 
be not cured, eradicated, will destroy all patriotic and 
manly virtue among us. The memory of the early colo- 
nists of this country of every sect and persuasion, is a 
possession to be guarded and cherished not by a party 
or a church, but by the whole United States of Ameri- 
ca. The colonists of Georgia, of Virginia, of Mary- 
land, of New York, of Rhode Island, of Massachusetts, 
of all New England, whatever peculiarities of habit 
and opinion they brought with them, are the ancestors 
of this great nation, mingled their blood in the revolu- 
tion ; their united memory of character and noble deeds, 
constitutes the ancestral escutcheon of our origin ; and 
despised be the man, whether he be now a foreigner or 
native, who shall endeavor to cast a blot upon any 
part of it. If there have been imperfections, if there 
have been intolerance, if there have been a mistak- 
en religious faith, if there have been something of 



62 FIRST LECTURE. 

the narrowness and superstition which beclouded and 
darkened all Europe, and out of which a part of our 
ancestry issued like lightning from the thunder-cloud, 
nay, like morning stars from the common darkness of 
nature, let it not be dw T elt upon to their discredit. Let 
us rather, like Shem and Japheth, go backward with 
the beautiful garment of filial veneration, and not, like 
accursed Ham, go out to uncover a father's nakedness. 
Whatever would lead a man to do this marks him for 
the scorn of his race ; and above all, if it be sectarian 
bitterness that would do it, it shows the mean and in- 
fernal quality of that ingredient ; for I had almost as 
soon a man would have burned my father at the stake 
because of his religious opinions, as cast a reproach 
upon his virtues, or endeavor to blot out their memory 
for the same cause. 

I am glad of the opportunity plainly and openly to 
say these things : and here I would add my tribute 
of thanks to Bishop Hughes, that he has put the 
Puritan Pilgrims and the Catholic Pilgrims of this 
country in the same place of grateful recollection in 
the heart of their descendants, that they fled from 
the bitterness of a religious persecution. We honor 
the memory of Sir George Calvert, the noble pre- 
siding spirit of the infant colony at St. Mary's, in 
Maryland, as w r e do the memory of the tenants of the 
Mayflower, for he did, in an intolerant age, what no 
other government in the wide world would do, put all 
Christian sects by law on an absolute equality. He went 
in some respects farther than the Puritans, for he rose 
superior even to the prevailing genius of his own Church. 
I say, we esteem it our privilege to honor his memory. 
Dear to our hearts is the memory of all the virtuous 



OUR NOBLE ANCESTRY. 63 

colonists, but dear especially is that noble band, who 
fled to the savages and wild beasts of this wilderness, 
for freedom to worship God ! Dear is the memory 
of the first Puritan Church, and the first Puritan minis- 
ter of the colony of Massachusetts Bay ; a church 
though without a bishop, yet as truly a Church of Je- 
sus Christ, as the w T hole persecuting establishment of 
England ; and a minister, though superior to the figment 
of the Apostolical succession, and though the hand of 
no earthly prelate ever w r as laid upon him, yet as di- 
vinely ordained a minister of Jesus Christ, as any 
bishop, from the first Pope to the present moment. I 
am sure that I speak the feelings of every patriotic and 
liberal mind in this country, when I say that the mem- 
ory of our Puritan ancestors is a possession of which 
the whole nation should be proud and jealous. 

Our boast is not that we deduce our birth, 
From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth ; 
But higher far'our proud pretensions rise, 
The sons of fathers passed into the skies ! 

We boast to have descended from an ancestry, who 
amidst persecution discovered and carried out the prob- 
lem, the possibility and the blessedness of which we, 
their descendants, are demonstrating to the whole 
world, a problem which we believe to be intimately 
connected with the possession and preservation of lib- 
erty for all mankind, A Church without a Bishop, and 
a State without a King. 



{At the conclusion of the Lecture, the Choir sung the following 
Kymn, written for the occasion.] 

THE PILGRIM'S LEGACY. 

The May-Flower, on New England's coast, has furl'd her tatter- 
ed sail, 
And through her chafed and moaning shrouds December's breezes 

wail, 
Yet on that icy deck, behold ! a meek but dauntless band, 
Who, for the right to worship God, have left their native land ; 
And to a dreary wilderness this glorious boon they bring, 
X< A church without a bishop, and a slate without a king " 

Those daring men, those gentle wives — say, wherefore do they 

come ? 
Why rend they all the tender ties of kindred and of home ? 
*Tis Heaven assigns their noble work, man's spirit to unbind ;— 
They come not for themselves alone — they come for all mankind ; 
And to the empire of the West this glorious boon they bring, 
"A church without a bishop, and a state without a king" 

Then, Prince and Prelate, hope no more to bend them to your 

sway, 
Devotion's fire inflames their breasts, and freedom points their 

way, 
And, in their brave hearts' estimate, 'twere better not to be, 
Than quail beneath a despot, where a soul cannot be free ; 
And therefore, o'er the wintry wave, those exiles come to bring 
<( A church without a bishop, and a state without a king." 

And still their spirit, in their sons, with freedom walks abroad, 

The BIBLE is our only creed, — our only monarch, GOD ! 

The hand is raised — the word is spoke — the solemn pledge is 

given, 
And boldly on our banner floats, in the free air of heaven, 
The motto of our sainted sires, and loud w T e'll make it ring— 
tc A church without a bishop, and a state without a king" 



SECOND LECTURE- 



INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT. 

There is a disposition in some quarters to regard eve* 
ry development of the nature of Romanism, as deline* 
ated in the pages of history, with the reproach of illibe- 
ral zeal or bigotry. We are sometimes told that we 
have heard often enough that the Catholics burnt John 
Huss, and the Calvinists Servetus, and that what we need 
is not to determine who did wrong in time past, but 
wherein is the security against its repetition in the fu- 
ture. And pray, how can we possibly learn to secure 
ourselves against its repetition in the future, but by 
knowing under what influences, in what circumstances, 
by what bodies or characters, it was committed in the 
past 1 For this purpose we must go into the depths 
and details of history ; in regard to religious persecu- 
tion, we must know who did it, and what for, by what 
motive, under what influences ; and as there is nothing 
so intensely interesting as the history of religious per- 
secution and of religious liberty, so there can be nothing 
more instructive to mankind. It is sometimes said that 
experience, like the stern lights of a ship, only serves to 
illumine the path that has been passed over. This 
is terribly true, if we are in the ship ourselves ; but 
if we are tracing the chart to find our right course from 



66 SECOND LECTURE. 

the experience of others, then we wish that every sunk- 
en rock and dangerous shallow should be marked ; we 
want them marked before us, from the experience of 
those who have seen them only in the path that has 
been passed over, or who perhaps have made shipwreck 
upon them. That is the light of history, and that the 
way to use it ; and therefore the charge of bigotry 
against those who would look narrowly into the nature 
of the Romish Despotism, and put light-houses upon 
those fierce jagged reefs, where lie the hulks of so many 
splendid and costly argosies, is illiberal in the extreme. 
If Bishop Hughes may make researches into the middle 
ages, and come to us with the astounding discovery 
that it is to the Despotism of the Papacy that we owe 
whatever of civil liberty we now possess, I claim the 
privilege of examining those same ages, and tracing, 
for my own satisfaction, the steps of the Apostolical 
succession, by which the greatest and purest liberty in 
the world has come to us here in America, not, as we 
had supposed, from the struggles of our forefathers 
against monarchical and prelatical oppression, but 
straight down from the most depraved, hypocritical, 
and unalloyed despotism in Europe. I am sure such a 
discovery of our parentage in the middle ages is worth 
looking after. If, also, our republican practice of re- 
presentation can be found in their utter rejection of the 
people from all share in the choice of their ecclesiasti- 
cal rulers, in the appointment of Bishops by Monarchs, 
or by the Pope, and in the election of the Supreme 
Pontiff by the College of Cardinals, let us also trace 
that amazing fact. Or if our habits of free deliberative 
discussion can be found in conclaves that met to delibe- 
rate on the best method and material for forging chains 



INTRODUCTION. 67 

for the people ; in the councils of the Lateran, or the 
council that deliberated on the question whether faith 
was to be kept with heretics, and then put John Huss 
and Jerome of Prague into the flames, and condemned 
John Wickliffe's poor mouldering bones to be dug up 
and burned, and the ashes thrown into the Trent ; let us 
have the pedigree ; and if we have wandered away 
from the paths of light in the Middle Ages, let us try 
and grope our way back again through the darkness of 
the Reformation. It might be recommended to the 
genius that made these discoveries, to consider the 
question whether Jefferson himself had not been search- 
ing the records of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 
when he wrote the Declaration of American Indepen- 
dence ; there is no reason why that immortal docu- 
ment should not be found amidst the unequalled free- 
dom of those ages, as well as our Saviour's Sermon on 
the Mount, amidst their benevolence and immaculate 
morality. 

In truth, if any original mind will make such discov- 
eries, it compels us to follow him ; we cannot resist it, 
any more than we could avoid going to see the Ark of 
Noah, if it should be brought into one of the New York 
Dry Docks for exhibition. We are not therefore to be 
blamed for following Bishop Hughes into the middle 
ages ; and if while our instructor is explaining to us 
the uses of fulminating thunder, we read also a guide- 
book that describes the consequences of its explosions ; 
if, while he points us to a huge bomb-shell and tells us it 
was the nest-egg of liberty, we see it in the guide-book 
knocking whole cities to pieces and destroying thou- 
sands of wretched people at once w T ith its missiles ; we 
are perfectly right to come to the conclusion that such 



68 SECOND LECTURE. 

thunder and such bomb-shells of freedom were better 
suited to the dark ages than to ours. If, when he leads 
us to the cave of Giant Pope, and tells us to observe 
the footsteps of civil liberty coming out of it, we, on 
looking narrowly, find there are many footsteps going 
in, but none returning, and that the cave is a vast cata- 
comb of bones and human ashes, I am sure we are very 
wise in telling Bishop Hughes that we will put our 
liberties somewhere else for safe-keeping. If he tells 
us to note the genuine republicanism of the Pope, and 
the very great aversion of the Church of Rome to the 
union of Church and State, we shall tell him that our 
native republicanism is quite good enough, and that we 
do not wish to have our veins opened, and any such 
ecclesiastical ingredients injected into them. Our tree 
of liberty stands, a native tree, and any graft from the 
trunk of Popish Republicanism seems to us very suspi- 
cious ; at all events we are sure that as our tree of 
liberty did not spring from the roots of the Hierarchical 
Despotism, so it cannot flourish under any of its dark 
shadows. We find that we feel the effect of those 
shadows first of all, there, where the baleful gloom is 
most pernicious, in the public schools of our children, 
and that they keep out not only the element of pure 
historic truth, but the light of heaven ; but as long as 
the country lasts, we will have those two things in our 
schools, Impartial History,, and the Word of God. By 
God's blessing we will have the sun and the air upon 
our Tree of Liberty as long as the world stands. 



UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 69 



UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 

III. Our third point of investigation is the alliance 
between the civil and ecclesiastical power, or in other 
words, the union of Church and State. 

On this point we have to go back to the combined civil 
and ecclesiastical constitution of the Roman Empire. 
The pontifical offices in that constitution were many 
and important. The highest of them were united with 
various civil dignities in the persons of the Emperor, 
the nobles, the senators and leading men of the State. 
Here w r as a vast politico-ecclesiastical hierarchy, 
against which the simplicity of Christianity was op- 
posed in every point. In this opposition, so far as the 
union of Church and State was concerned, the infant 
kingdom of Christ grew up, till the Emperor Constan- 
tine took it under his protection, and exercised a pow- 
er over it similar to that which as Roman Emperor 
he had always been wont to exercise over the religion 
of Paganism. He took the Christian C hurch into a 
strict alliance with the Roman State, and combined in 
his own person, as King Henry the Eighth did first in 
England, the highest ecclesiastical and civil authority. 
He could no longer indeed be himself a Prie st, and in 
establishing by law the Christian religion, he did in ef- 
fect impose the first limitation on the imperial authority. 
It w r as the first legal acknowledgment of any right in a 
subject apart from the control of the Emperor, when 
the Emperor himself was excluded from the right of 
administering the sacraments of the Christian Church. 
At the same time, in that establishment by law, he 
made himself the Supreme Head of the Church of 
Christ on earth, assumed to himself an authority which 
5* 



70 SECOND LECTURE. 

Christ alone possesses over his Church, and taught that 
Church to look to and trust in an earthly head as its 
protector. From this measure and this period is to he 
traced the mixture and confusion of spiritual and tem- 
poral power, which continued, with but little interrup- 
tion, for more than fourteen centuries; from this mea- 
sure is to be traced the assumption, openly, by the 
Church of Christ, of the characteristics of a kingdom 
of this world ; from this measure is to be traced the al- 
most boundless wealth and power of the Church as a 
worldly kingdom/ and the consequent ambition, cor- 
ruption and utter wickedness of the whole body of the 
clergy throughout Christendom. 

But you will remark that this measure could not 
have been adopted, this alliance could not have taken 
place, had not the Church before that period begun to 
assume the characteristics of a worldly hierarchy. 
Had the Church of Christ retained its primitive sim- 
plicity, Constantine, on becoming a Christian, would 
have found nothing in Christianity to take to an 
alliance with the State, except its religious spirit and 
obligations. He would have become one of a com- 
munity of Christians, who would have received him, 
as any other immortal being, into Christ's simple 
fold, but would have said to him, in respect to all 
worldly alliance or patronage of the State, Just let 
us alone, and simply give to us the liberty to ex- 
tend our religion, and the same privileges, and no 
greater, which all the subjects of the Roman Empire 
enjoy, and we ask no more ; we reject everything 
else, and we render unto Caesar the things which are 
Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's. 
But instead of this, the Church was already prepared, 



UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 71 

when Constantine embraced Christianity, to assume 
the form of a vast organized, formidable hierarchy, 
with its ambitious degrees, its grades of power and 
grandeur rising one above another, its diocesan sees, 
with ecclesiastical divisions corresponding with the 
political divisions of the Empire, and contending for 
the supremacy, its gorgeous rites, its judicial courts^ 
its corporate properties, its convocations and its coun- 
cils. The Emperor Constantine, in incorporating this 
great institution by law, and placing himself at the 
head of it, in legalizing its courts, its possessions, its 
authorities, in exempting its higher clergy from secu- 
lar jurisdiction, and in compelling the magistrates to 
enforce its judicial edicts, did in fact assume to himself 
a mighty power, which before he did not possess. Nay, 
he may be said to have created a new worldly power, 
investing himself with the supremacy in it; taking, as 
it were, the mould made ready to his hands in the ec- 
clesiastical hierarchy, and pouring into it the element, 
which was to convert it from the spiritual kingdom of 
Christ into a consolidated body of combined spiritual 
and temporal power. 

It is true that there was not the full organization 
already existing; but the^tendencies in full there cer- 
tainly were, the prefigurings, the indications, the sug- 
gestions of such a system ; and the mind of Constan- 
tine was too acute and too quick not to note what 
would be of such vast utility to the consolidation of his 
Empire. There were potential ambitious tendencies 
in the Church, powerfully fostered by grades of author- 
ity, which only needed the wand of power in the hands 
of the Imperial Magician to touch them, and there 
should stand forth a vast Ecclesiastical Monarchy, the 



72 SECOND LECTURE, 

very counterpart of the Empire, a rib out of its side, 
but ready to advance from a dependent monarchy in 
alliance, to an absorbing despotism in itself, that should 
cover and subdue the world. Alas ! the Church her- 
self had prepared herself for the indignity and misery 
of being wooed and won by the allurements of earthly 
pomp and splendor to a legalized establishment of 
alliance with the State. Instead of the Bride the 
Lamb's wife, the State's Mistress had made herself 
ready ; and the Emperor Constantine, for his part, 
knew no better, than to believe the alliance perfectly 
lawful and just. The best that can be said of it is that 
it was a marriage of convenience and not of love, on 
both sides; and it resulted, in the course of ages, as 
most marriages of selfishness and convenience do, in 
misery to both parties. Yet the Emperor Constantine 
was a great gainer; the union brought with it a vast 
addition to his reputation, his authority, his influence. 
His Ecclesiastical Bride had, to say the least, a mag- 
nificent dowry of prelacy and superstition to put at his 
command. He relinquished nothing of his power over 
the Heathen world, but he created and assumed a new 
power in the Christian world, and he saw plainly that 
it was for his interest greatly to increase that power. 

THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
UTTERLY FORGOTTEN. 

From this time forward the idea of the separation be- 
tween the spiritual and temporal power is more and 
more lost sight of and forgotten. In the Christianity of 
the New Testament, and in the early Church, it is an 
evident and simple element of Christian existence, and 



ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION FORGOTTEN. 73 

of the Christian institutions. From the time of Con- 
stantine it goes out of being, and the effort of the Ro- 
mish Church, from the period of her acknowledged su- 
premacy, becomes, more and more clearly and indispu- 
tably and without concealment, the possession and con- 
centration of supreme and independent power, both 
spiritual and temporal, within herself. In this sense, 
then, it may be said that the Romish Church, at the 
time of its most uncontrolled despotism over men's lib- 
erties, disavowed the union of Church and State, be- 
cause she arrogated to herself t the possession of all 
power in both, because she said within herself, I am the 
State, and from me all temporal as well as spiritual 
power flows. But if this assumption could not be car- 
ried out to the full, the Romish Church, compelled to 
content herself with something low T er, always deemed 
lawful and right whatever union of Church and State 
might enable her to carry forward her purposes. She 
never denounced that Union, except so far as it lessened 
her own power ; she always maintained that union if 
it might increase her power ; and she only left it, or 
repudiated it, in order to rise superior to it, in order 
herself to control the State. Rome for example, in the 
very vigorous language of Campbell on the clerical 
claims of authority over the secular powers, "Rome 
always asserted resolutely, and in most cases success- 
fully, the clergy's right of exemption from being taxed 
by the secular powers ; but it was in order to slip into 
the place of those powers, and assume the prerogative 
of taxing them herself. This, though always contro- 
verted by temporal rulers, she so effectually secured, 
that Sovereigns, in any remarkable exigenc^, especially 
when they could plead some holy enterprise, such as a 



74 SECOND LECTURE. 

crusade for the massacre of infidels or heretics, were 
fain to recur to the Pope, as the easiest and surest way 
to obtain the assistance of their own clergy. This also 
gave the Pope an easy method of bribing princes to his 
side, when he wanted to destroy or mortify any adverse 
power. It was his usual game to play the bishop 
against the king ; but this, when his subalterns proved 
mutinous, he could successfully reverse, and play the 
king against the bishop." 

In this place it is, that in furtherance of our ar- 
gument, I may rpost conveniently and appropriately 
add, what ought not to be omitted, some notice of 
the famous scheme prepared in the Council of Trent 
for the reformation of secular persons and authori- 
ties. The whole chapter of thirteen decrees shows 
perhaps more perfectly and conclusively the nature 
of the Romish claims, and the mixture of civil and 
ecclesiastical power in the middle ages, than any 
other document in history. The council, confident that 
princes will acquiesce, and cause due obedience to 
be rendered to the clergy, admonishes them before 
other things to oblige their magistrates, delegates, and 
other temporal lords to render their pastors that obedi- 
ence, which those princes themselves are bound to per- 
form to the Sovereign Pontiff; and for this purpose 
anew enforces whatever has been decreed by the sacred 
canons and the imperial laws in favor of ecclesiastical 
immunities, which ought to be observed by all under 
pain of anathema. Some of the decrees were as fol- 
lows, namely : That ecclesiastical persons may not be 
judged in a secular court, not even on plea of public 
utility, nor however doubtful may be their clerical title. 
That in causes spiritual of matrimony, heresy, patron- 



ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION FORGOTTEN. 75 

age, beneficial, civil, criminal and mixed, over persons 
and goods, howsoever belonging to the ecclesiastical 
court, the temporal judges shall not intermeddle, nor any 
appeal to the secular magistrate be suffered. That 
neither the emperor, kings, nor any prince whatsoever, 
shall make edicts or constitutions, in what manner so- 
ever, concerning ecclesiastical causes or persons, nor 
meddle with their persons, causes, jurisdictions or tribu- 
nals, no, not in the Inquisition ; but shall be bound to 
offer the secular arm to the ecclesiastical judges. That 
the temporal jurisdiction of the ecclesiastics, though 
with mere and mixed power, shall not be disturbed, nor 
their subjects drawn to the secular tribunals in causes 
temporal. That the letters, sentences and citations of 
judges ecclesiastical, especially of the court of Rome, 
so soon as they be exhibited, shall be intimated with- 
out exception, published and executed. There was 
also an epilogue, admonishing all persons to have in 
veneration the things which concern the clergy, as pe- 
culiar to God, and not to suffer them to be offended by 
others, renewing all the constitutions of popes and holy 
canons, in favor of ecclesiastical immunity. 

The study of these decrees may throw much light on 
the nature of power in the Middle Ages. The ecclesi- 
astical power could command the aid of the secular; 
this always constitutes the union of Church and State, 
and the supremacy, in a dark period, of the clergy. 
There was a distinction of the kinds of power, into tem- 
poral and spiritual ; but the clergy confounded them 
whenever they pleased, and the greater part of the ec- 
clesiastical power was strictly temporal. " Under the 
general term spiritual, they had got included the more 
important part of civil matters, also, affairs matrimo- 



76 SECOND LECTURE. 

nial and testamentary, questions of legitimacy and suc- 
cession, covenants and conventions, and wherever the 
interposition of an oath was customary. Add to these 
that they were the sole arbiters of the rights avowedly 
civil of the Church and Churchmen, and in everything 
wherein these had, in common with laymen, any share 
or concern." 

It is to the Emperors Justinian and Charlemagne 
that we are to look for the main sources of such a body 
of mingled temporal and spiritual authority as is here 
exhibited. What the effect of it must have been for 
ages on the morals of the clergy themselves, and the 
well-being of the people, almost every faithful histo- 
rian has depicted, in presenting the reality of life as it 
was, in the events that unfolded it. The independence 
produced in the Bishops over the inferior clergy, when 
the right of election was taken from them, and the 
Bishoprics became regal appointments, tended to make 
that class the most immoral and despotic of all eccle- 
siastics. " Sole administrator of the revenues of the 
church," says an Episcopal historian before quoted, 
" the Bishop possessed the most ample means of plun- 
der and usurpation ; while his close connection with 
political transactions, and the weight which he exerted 
in the most important deliberations of the State, so in- 
terwove the temporal with the spiritual office and du- 
ties, and also added to his legitimate authority so much 
temporal power, that there were few excesses which he 
might not hope to commit with impunity. It is therefore 
without surprise that we find him at one time advancing 
to battle at the head of his armed attendants, and at 
another engaged in marauding expeditions, from mo- 
tives of plunder or private hostility. His habits and 



VAL5E POSITION OF GUIZOT. 77 

taanners alike departed from the ecclesiastical charac- 
ter, and he grew to resemble the rude barons who sur- 
Tounded him, both in the extent of his power, and the 
insolence with which he exercised it." 

I may add to this what seems the symptom of the 
highest possible degree of disease in the mingling and 
confusion of temporal and spiritual things in the Church, 
the organization of the new religious order of the 
Knights Templars and others. It has almost always 
been a question whether the profession of arms were 
permitted to Christians, or were compatible with sal- 
vation ; but the Romish Church contrived to make it, 
as Fleury himself has remarked, a state of perfection, 
and to join to it the three vows essential to a religious 
•life. 



FALSE POSITION OF GUIZOT. 

It has been said by Guizot that the Church at the 
period of the incursions of the Northern barbarians 
upon the Roman empire, was driven to an assertion of 
the separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, 
as a means of defence against barbarism. But in point 
of fact there was no such assertion. The Church 
never said to the barbarians, " Spiritual and temporal 
power is distinct, therefore respect our consciences, 
keep to yourselves, and trench not upon the Churches 
privileges ; 5J but she said, " The Spiritual power is su- 
perior to the temporal, which is bound to pay obedience 
to the Church, and to carry into execution her edicts." 
And this was an assertion which corresponded with the 
whole habits of veneration for priestly authority to 
which these Northern invaders had been accustomed. 
6 



TO SECOND LECTURE, 

They could understand much more clearly the voice 
of the Priesthood when it said, We are your gods, 
or the omnipotent ministers of God, than if it had said, 
We hold a spiritual authority totally separate from 
the temporal, and therefore you must respect us. And 
let me add, the superstitious multitude were much more 
ready to obey, as well as clear to understand, the sim- 
ple despotism of the first principle, than the simple, 
but, to their minds, unintelligible spiritualism of the 
last. It is in itself one of the greatest absurdities, and, 
moreover, it is flatly contradicted by all history, and is 
a mere groundless dream of generalization, to suppose 
that a principle which was only acted on and under- 
stood in the severest early purity of the Christian Reli- 
gion, and which had been lost sight of and reversed in 
practice from the time of Constantine, should be suddenly 
assumed in the midst of increasing corruption, and 
flashed forth in a preserving light for the protection of 
the Church from the tide of Northern Barbarism. And 
yet Guizot has carelessly asserted that the separation 
of temporal and spiritual power is one of the great 
benefits which the Christian Church extended to Euro- 
pean society in the fifth century ! Why ! this benefit 
would have been nothing less than a revulsion and 
obliteration of the whole ecclesiastical laws of the em- 
pire, from Constantine downwards. And yet it is here 
supposed to have been conferred upon the world amidst 
the darkness and storms of a deluge of barbarians I 
But the same writer himself contradicts this position in 
his very next sentences, when he says, " There already 
prevailed in the bosom of the Church a desire to sepa- 
rate the governing and the governed. The attempt was 
thus early made to render the government entirely inde- 



FALSE POSITION OFGUIZOT. 79 

pendent of the people under its authority, to take pos- 
session of their mind and life, without the conviction of 
their reason, or the consent of their will. The Church, 
moreover, endeavored with all her might to establish 
the principle of theocracy, to usurp temporal authority, 
to obtain universal dominion. And when she failed in 
this, when she found she could not obtain absolute 
power for herself, she did what was almost as bad ; to 
obtain a share of it, she leagued herself with temporal 
rulers, and enforced, with all her might, their claim to 
absolute power at the expense of the liberty of the sub- 
ject." What now becomes of Guizot's first hasty as- 
sertion ? A Church undertaking to confer upon the 
world the benefit of a separation of the spiritual and 
temporal power, and yet laboring to usurp temporal 
authority, to obtain universal dominion, and in order to 
get a share, at least, of absolute power, leaguing her- 
self with temporal rulers, and enforcing with all her 
might their claim to absolute power at the expense of 
the liberty of the subject ! If any w 7 ho hear me are 
disposed to doubt that Guizot could have committed 
such an inconsistency, could so have stultified his own 
erroneous argument, by so clear an after flashing of 
the truth, they are requested to turn to pages 56, 57, 
and 58 of the English edition of his History of Civili- 
sation, and read them consecutively. There is not a 
mind in this assembly but will see in a moment the 
correctness of what I have advanced. It only shows 
the facility of hasty, unfounded generalization. 



SO SECOND LECTURE 



HISTORICAL PROGRESS OF THE ROMISH DESPOTISM, 

Let us now, in the period from Gregory to Charle- 
magne, for 200 years, and afterwards down to the 
Reformation, trace some of the steps of this mixture of 
spiritual and temporal power, this union of Church and 
State, and finally this centralization of all power in 
the Despotism of Rome. 

One thing is remarkable, you will find, in tracing 
this union, in pursuing the course of civil and ecclesias- 
tical power, that almost invariably the point where 
they meet, the point of union, is a point of enormous 
oppression and crime. Kept by themselves, and under 
the Divine law r of mercy to the world, these two sys- 
tems of influence, like two enormous thunderclouds, 
may let fall their contents on the earth in a shower of 
blessings ; but the instant they unite, then the light- 
ning descends, and where it strikes, burns and shatters. 
Just so w T ith either the union of spiritual and temporal 
power in one, or the league of spiritual and temporal 
power for each other's assistance; the meeting is dis- 
astrous and destructive to mankind; the thunder roars, 
and the lightning strikes, burns, and shatters. Nothing 
can stand against it. The league of civil and ecclesi- 
astical power has always proved a compound blow- 
pipe of despotism ; it can burn up everything. 

The first great manifest instance of this union occurs 
in the year 751, when Pope Zachary, in order to gain 
the assistance of France against the Greeks and Lom- 
bards, assisted the usurper Pepin to depose his master 
and benefactor Childeric, the King of France, and to 
possess himself of his crown and kingdom. The Ro- 



PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 81 

mish writers say that Zachary, by his pontifical power, 
deposed Childeric, and raised Pepin to the throne. 
Pope Zachary's successor, Stephen IL, confirmed this 
act of usurpation, and sent a pontifical letter, enjoining 
Pepin and his kingdom to assist the Pope and the Ro- 
mans by making war upon the Lombards. Pepin ac- 
cordingly marched an army over the Alps against the 
Pope's enemies, and in his turn assisted the Pope to 
usurp the imperial dominions in Italy. The next year 
the Lombard king again invaded Rome, and again 
Pepin marched into Italy, and in conjunction with the 
Pope conquered his enemy, and bestowed upon him 
the beautiful Grecian provinces in the north of Italy, 
which he had wrested from the Lombard king. The 
motive of Pepin in this unexampled liberality, which 
laid the foundation of the Pope's temporal dominion, 
and constituted him a temporal sovereign, was to ex- 
piate his sins, and especially to secure forgiveness for 
his crime against Childeric. Thus Pope Stephen and 
King Pepin became reciprocally guarantees of each 
other's usurpations, Stephen by his spiritual power, 
and Pepin by his temporal. 

Our next step in tracing the progress of this union, 
brings us to the Emperor Charlemagne. After the 
death of Pepin, the Lombards again invaded the Pope's 
territories, and again the Pope sought the monarch's 
assistance. Charlemagne crossed the Alps with a 
powerful army, overturned the Empire of the Lom- 
bards, confirmed the donations of Pepin to the Pope, 
besides adding some other cities and provinces in Italy 
to be possessed by the Romish Pontiff in perpetuo. In 
all this the politic Charlemagne was looking to su- 
preme dominion, and needing the concurrence of the 



82 SECOND LECTURE. 

Romish Pontiff; the Pope was ready to pay almost 
any price for such a magnificent increase of the tem- 
poral possessions of his See ; and accordingly in the 
year 800, Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo 
III., Emperor of the West. 

The donations of the Emperor to the Pope were 
gained from him partly by means of a forged grant of 
Constantine to the See of Rome, conveying from that 
Emperor to the possession of the Church, the city and 
adjacent territories of Rome. Pope Adrian had sent 
this forged grant to Charlemagne, who fully believed 
its authenticity, exhorting him to make restitution of 
what had formerly been given to St. Peter and the 
Church. Through all the confusion and uproar in the 
kingdom of Charlemagne, which for near two centuries 
followed the death of this great Emperor, the power 
of the Popes was consolidating, but their dependence 
on the Imperial Crown still remained. In the year 
1073, in the Popedom of Gregory the Seventh, we 
have another most important era of Pontifical Power, 
in w T hich the project was conceived, and its execution 
commenced, of abolishing the connection between the 
Church and State, by making the State itself dependent 
on the Church, by centralizing and consolidating uni- 
versal temporal power in the Roman Pontiff. The 
foundation was laid by the Seventh Gregory, a most 
remarkable man, who succeeded in plucking both from 
the Roman people and the German Emperor all right 
of interference in the election of the Pope, and fixed 
that election in the College of Cardinals. One century 
afterwards another Pope appeared, prepared to carry 
out the designs formed by the vast ambition of Gregory, 
and to consummate the Papal Supremacy, temporal 



TH GPv ESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 83 

and spiritual, over all kingdoms, ranks, and conditions 
of mankind. 

This was Innocent III. He excommunicated kings, 
laid kingdoms under interdicts, gave their crowns and 
possessions to Emperors and Princes, raised the war of 
persecution against the Albigenses, absolving the sub- 
jects of the Count of Thoulouse from their oath of alle- 
giance, excommunicated King John of England, laid 
the kingdom under an interdict, and declared the throne 
vacant. He convened the fourth Lateran council, in 
which all Christendom, East and West, Church and 
State, submitted to him. In the Crusade against the 
Albigenses, a pure, simple-minded, holy band of Chris- 
tians, Innocent III. issued a rescript to all the Lords of 
the South, to the French king, and to the nation, to 
take up arms against the Reformers. All the privi- 
leges, temporal and spiritual, bestowed on those who 
fought for Jerusalem, were offered to those who would 
butcher the Albigenses. 

As to the reproaches and slanders with which it has 
been attempted to blacken the character of the Albi- 
genses, as if this would be some excuse for the infernal 
crusade against them, I simply refer you to the French 
Historian, Sismondi, for a fair and impartial survey of 
their doctrines and their virtues. To a person thorough- 
ly acquainted with the Church of Rome, it would be 
sufficient seal and testimony to the real excellence of 
any body of sectarians, that in the plenitude of her 
power she persecuted them unto tortures and death ; 
to her, an evident token of perdition, but to them of 
salvation, and that of God. " Those very persons," 
says Sismondi, " who punished the sectaries with fright- 
ful torments, have alone taken upon themselves to 



84 SECOND LEC T URE. 

make us acquainted with their opinions ; allowing, at 
the same time, that they had been transmitted in Gaul 
from generation to generation, almost from the origin 
of Christianity. Nevertheless, amidst many puerile 
or calumnious tales, it is still easy to recognize the 
principles of the sixteenth century amongst the heretics 
who are distinguished by the names of Vaudois or Al- 
bigeois." Among other things, they charged with 
idolatry the exposure of images in the churches. Their 
country was lovely, their community happy and pros- 
perous. Pope Innocent, the Fanatic of Hell, resolved 
to exterminate them. 

Under this Pope grew up the dreadful conflicts be- 
tween the Guelphs and Ghibellines, which devastated 
all Italy, the first party supporting the rights of Empe- 
rors, the second the usurpations of the Pope. Thus 
the centralization of power went on, the very conflicts 
that seemed to shake, in the end consolidating it, 
throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For 
a season it was the habit of mankind to have a Pope 
in everything ; centralization and despotism were the 
prevailing ideas in religion, in philosophy, in politics. 
The Pope in Rome, Aristotle in philosophy, and the 
German Emperor in political power, divided the world. 
But this idea of centralization, unity, despotism, admit- 
ting in religion no rivals, the pontifical power soon ab- 
sorbed all others, by the very universality and remorse- 
less simplicity and consistency of its claims. The 
great whirlpool of the world admitted inferior eddies to 
circle within itself, so they did but all tend towards 
the great devouring centre. Thus the various orders 
of monks in these centuries were so many legalized 
licenses to the spirit of sectarianism, that otherwise 



PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 85 

would have burst out in hostility to the Church of 
Rome. The Popedom acted like the French Govern- 
ment in sanctioning houses of ill-fame, and gathering 
a revenue out of them. The pontifical power provided 
and sanctioned these craters for the lava of opinion, of 
sectarianism, as so many safety-valves, that, being 
kept under management and control by the great cen- 
tral power and intelligence, could let the steam of 
heresy itself collect and roar and spend its fury, since 
it all combined to turn the engine of pontifical despot- 
ism with more resistless, overwhelming force. In point 
of fact, heresies were broached among these monks, 
that, if they had been discovered in any organization 
or state that did not acknowledge the Pope's supreme 
authority, would have been the signal for the massacre 
of the inhabitants of whole provinces. Thus, if liberty 
of opinion must be admitted, the pontifical despotism 
adopted the policy, as somewhere has been expressed, 
and I think in Jortin, of " walling them in," and let- 
ting them play their tricks, like so many lunatics, in. 
their separate wards, all under the seal and keeping of the 
Ecclesiastical Empire. This could well be done with 
all heresies but those that proceeded directly from the 
word of God, and laid open the enormous vices of the 
Romish Constitution. Against such as these, extermi- 
nating crusades could always be launched by the 
Pope's fulminating thunders. The varieties of philo- 
sophical opinion could be safely admitted, indeed they 
were absolutely useful to the Pontifical despotism, as 
giving employment and exercise to the strongest and 
acutest minds under its dominion, whose awakening 
energies would otherwise inevitably have worked 
upon the glaring abuses of the Church, upon the con- 
6* 



86 SECOND LECTURE. 

cealed truths of the Gospel, and upon the ideas of 
popular and individual freedom. Besides, when any 
of the vagaries of philosophical opinion went too far, 
or became absolutely dangerous, the terrors of excom- 
munication were ready at hand to cut off their sources 
of life, and convert them into monsters for the world's 
devouring fear and hatred. I am reminded of the 
familiar couplet in one of the primers of our child- 
hood, — 

r The cat doth play, 
And after slay. 

For as a cat does with a mouse before she eats it, so 
did the Court of Rome in her play with heresies, and 
with permitted heretics ; when she became tired with 
them, or when they sought to escape her jurisdiction, 
but a word and a blow was needed. And if they were 
scriptural heresies, the heresies of true piety, the whole 
malignity of that court was let loose upon them from 
the first discovery. 

It is quite impossible to follow the course of the Ro- 
mish Hierarchy in its union of all power, temporal and 
spiritual, in and under itself, in greater detail, from the 
point where we have now arrived, for we enter on a 
sea of miseries. It will be sufficient to indicate, as 
personifications of the nature and spirit of this Hierar- 
chy, Pope Gregory IX. in the thirteenth century, un- 
der whom Death on the Pale Horse rode over the 
world through the gates of the Inquisition ; Boniface 
VIII. in the fourteenth, who styled himself universal 
Lord, in all things spiritual and temporal, who declared 
in his Bull Unam Sanctam, that there is but one 
Church of Christ under one head, all out of which 



PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 87 

necessarily perish ; that the swords spiritual and mate- 
rial are both in the power of the Church, the first to 
be wielded by the priesthood, the second for the priest- 
hood by kings and soldiers ; that the temporal power is 
subjected to the spiritual, otherwise the Church would 
be a double-headed monster ; that whosoever resists this 
order of things resists the ordinance of God, and that it 
is absolutely necessary to salvation that every human 
being should be subject to the Roman Pontiff. In the 
person of Alexander VI. in the fifteenth century, de- 
nominated the Nero of the Popes, with his son Csesar 
Borgia, we have the climax of combined power and 
wickedness. Alexander and his son were one and the 
same incarnation. As the unity of the heart is to be 
seen in its own central action, as well as in the quality 
of the blood which it sends to the very extremities of 
the body, so the perfect nature of the Pontifical despot- 
ism is to be seen in its play in its own central temporal 
sovereignty. " The head of the Church/' says the his- 
torian Ranke, " pursued the interests of his temporal 
sovereignty with greater ardor and pertinacity than 
heretofore, and devoted all his activity to their advance- 
ment. For some time things had strongly tended this 
way. Formerly, said an orator in the Council of 
Basle, I was of opinion that it would be well to sepa- 
rate the temporal entirely from the spiritual power ; 
but I have learned that virtue without force is ludi- 
crous ; that the Pope of Rome, without the hereditary 
possession of the Church, is only the servant of kings 
and princes." Pope Sixtus IV. pursued this scheme 
of personal domination ; Alexander VI. completed it. 
After a description like the dark, stern coloring of 
Tacitus, of the hell of crime in Italy under Alexander's 



88 SECOND LECTURE, 

despotism, Ranke observes, " there was but one point 
on earth where such a state of things was possible ; 
that, namely, at which the plenitude of secular power 
was united to the supreme spiritual jurisdiction. This 
point was occupied by Caesar. There is a perfection 
even in depravity. The complaint arose that the Pope 
labored for the coming of the kingdom, not of Heaven, 
but of Satan." 

Now, I wish you to remark from this review the 
manner in which the Church of Rome may be said to 
disavow the union,of Church and State. It is simply 
thus in the sense of Boniface VIII., " that the temporal 
power is subjected to the spiritual, otherwise the 
Church would be a double-headed monster." Wher- 
ever there has not been this subjection, the Church has 
sought the loan and use of the temporal power for her 
purposes ; in a word she has been contented to ally 
herself with the State, whenever she could not render 
herself superior to it ; and now, wherever in all the 
world the Romish Church can employ the arm of the 
State for her purposes, that union of Church and State 
will be deemed legitimate and just. 

Need I point to modern instances ? There are 
some most marvellously to our purpose. You may 
take the Sandwich Islands, for example. I would like 
to ask, What was the violent introduction and estab- 
lishment of the Roman Catholic religion in those 
islands, together with the trade in French brandy, en- 
forced at the mouth of cannon, by French ships-of- 
w r ar? Was it not the use of the secular arm by the 
Romish Church to accomplish her purposes ? Was it 
ever disavowed either by the French Government or 
the Romish Church ? It was as palpable an instance 






PROGRESS OF ROMISH DESPOTISM. 89 

of tyranny in the union of civil and ecclesiastical 
power, as can be found in the whole history of the 
middle ages; nor is the use of the secular power any 
more repudiated now, than it was in those ages. Nor 
can any man doubt that had our own country been 
in a position similar to that of the Sandwich Islands 
with reference to the French Government and the Ro- 
mish Church, and as w T eak as the Sandwich Islands, 
precisely the same tyranny would have been exercised 
upon us. For why should not French priests and 
French brandy be enforced upon one country as w T ell 
as another ? We indeed are too strong ; but I am 
simply showing that the principle, the disposition, the 
willingness exists, and except by individuals, as in the 
case of Bishop Hughes, is never, that I am aware of, 
disavowed. Nor do I think that Bishop Hughes' dis- 
avowal would have the slightest effect upon his own 
Church, if that Church should have presented to her 
an opportunity to establish herself by power. She 
would have no scruple whatever to use the arm of 
secular authority in her own behalf. I suppose that 
she would feel bound to do this by her own spiritual 
allegiance to the PontifFat her head. If Bishop Hughes 
disavows it, so much the greater credit to him ; but 
the disavowal is in the face of the practices and princi- 
ples of his ow 7 n Church in all past generations. I 
hope, for one, that the Romish Church in this country 
will bear him out in this disavowal, will remind him of 
it, will keep him to it. Other men have disavowed it 
besides himself; the great Romish ecclesiastical his- 
torian, for example, the excellent and learned Abbe 
Fleury, makes the same disavowal, and uncovers w T ith 
great plainness many of the enormities of the Romish 



90 SECOND LECTURE. 

system ; but his voice has no effect whatever on the 
Church. 

Bishop Hughes has denominated the union of Church 
and State, which in point of fact has characterized the 
existence of the Romish Church ever since its organi- 
zation as the supreme universal hierarchy, a historical 
accident. It is a singular accident, which took 1500 
years in happening, and which is still happening every 
day. He makes the acute remark that if God by his 
own omnipotence had ordered the affairs of the world 
differently for 1500 years, those affairs would have 
happened differently. 

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 

IV. We come now to the fourth great principle of evil, 
the employment of civil penalties for the compulsion of 
the conscience in religious things. This is the most 
dreadful result of the alliance between the civil and 
ecclesiastical hierarchies. Were there no other alli- 
ance, the use of civil penalties by the Church would con- 
stitute such an alliance. It is vain to say that the 
Church does not seek such alliance ; if, w T hen the use of 
civil penalties is offered or rendered possible by the 
State, the Church avails herself of them, she deliberate- 
ly unites herself to the State. It is the very principle 
in common law, that the receiver is one with the thief. 
And now, in pursuit of this point, I shall show what 
indeed has already been made manifest, the perfect 
truth of that popular view of the subject, wherein we 
are apt to imagine that the Church and the State were 
two great tyrants, who, if they had kept separate, 
could not have accomplished much to the detriment of 
mankind ; and who, for this reason, agreed to unite, for 



RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 91 

the purpose of more effectually enthralling their com- 
mon subjects. I agree perfectly with Bishop Hughes, 
in supposing that at the period when the union of 
Church and State first took place, it is quite probable, 
that neither the heads of the State, nor the authorities 
of the Church, had the slightest anticipation of the 
ulterior consequences to which it has led. But the am- 
bition which had already become rife in the Church, 
and which grew with frightful rapidity after this union, 
almost immediately laid hold of it as the origin of reli- 
gious persecution, and the means of unlimited temporal 
authority and power. At first it is manifest the great 
bond of union was the legalization of that ecclesiastical 
tribunal of which I have spoken. It is very clear that 
such a spiritual tribunal existed by courtesy before the 
time of the Emperor Constantine. Being by him estab- 
lished by law, and temporal authority given to it, it be- 
came a mixed temporal and spiritual judiciary of irre- 
sistible power. I shall not attempt to trace in detail 
the history of religious persecution. Everywhere it is 
the history of the union of Church and State. The 
Emperor Honorius, in the year 4 14, made a cruel decree 
against the African Donatists, denominated heretics. 
The civil magistrate in Africa, fearful of offending 
the Emperor, by showing any favor to the Donatists, 
unwilling also to put the law against them in execution, 
consulted Augustine, who advised him by all means to 
use the utmost rigor as the best way of converting 
these schismatics, and of compelling them to come in ; 
since it was better that some should burn themselves, 
as they had threatened to do in their own churches, than 
that they should all burn eternally in hell. It is a me- 
lancholy truth that Augustine was one of the first ad- 
vocates for the severe punishment of heretics. In the 



92 SECOND LECTURE. 

year 385 Priscillian, a Bishop in Spain, was by the 
Emperor, through the persuasions of some Bishops op- 
posed to him, committed to a civil judge for sentence, 
and was, with some of his adherents, put to death ; the 
first instance on record of a criminal prosecution for 
heresy. The laws of Theodosius against heretics, and 
for the prohibition of their worship of God according 
to their own conscience, were of inexorable severity. 
" The theory of persecution," says Gibbon, " was es- 
tablished by Theodosius, whose justice and piety have 
been applauded by the saints ; but the practice of it in 
the fullest extent, was reserved for his rival and col- 
league Maximus, the first among the Christian princes 
who shed the blood of his Christian subjects on account 
of their religious opinions. Since the death of Prisci- 
lian, the rude attempts at persecution have been refined 
and methodized in the holy office, which assigns their 
distinct parts to the ecclesiastical and secular powers. 
The devoted victim is regularly delivered by the priest 
to the magistrate, and by the magistrate to the execu- 
tioner." 

The councils of the Church united with the laws of 
the empire, to establish the dominion of terror and force 
over men's consciences. Their grand business came at 
length to be the condemnation and punishment of reli- 
gious opinion maintained in opposition to the Church. 
Uniformity of religious opinion was the law of the ec- 
clesiastical despotism ; the punishment of opinion was 
the crushing weight of ecclesiastical unity. This mix- 
ture of spiritual and temporal power was not confined 
to ecclesiastical courts or bodies. Bishops and other 
Church dignitaries became Counts, Dukes and Mar- 
quises, with temporal territory and jurisdiction. " In the 
acts of the Council of Soissons, about the middle of the 



RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. 93 

ninth century, Bishops are empowered to scourge and 
beat the peasants and vassals belonging to any of the 
nobles, when they deserved correction. Thus, say? 
Fleury, the prelates mingled temporal with spiritual 
jurisdiction. But they carried their insolence much 
farther, for about this time they began to claim the 
power of deposing Jdngs." (Jortin. 4: 501.) 

From this time downward the path of the Romish 
hierarchy is almost literally tracked in blood. The 
history of the Inquisition is a history of war on the 
part of the Romish Church united with the State 
against the freedom of religious opinion. This remark- 
able invention, and the establishment of it in the vari- 
ous countries of Europe, and its instrumentality in sup- 
port of the Papal power, constitute the most perfect 
development of the dreadful influence of the union of 
temporal and spiritual power against the liberty of 
man. And this institution, this horrible engine of 
cruelty, is solely the institution of the Romish Church ; 
it is the offspring of the combination of temporal and 
spiritual power in that Church. And yet, in the lan- 
guage of Bishop Hughes, this combination is simply 
61 a historical accident in the annals of the Catholic 
Church. It happened so ; but if Providence had ar- 
ranged the outward affairs of the world differently, it 
would have happened otherwise. " The Inquisition is 
one of the most tremendous accidents that ever hap- 
pened to mankind ; the union of Church and State by 
which this accident happened is itself also an historical 
accident w T hich was happening for fifteen centuries; 
but if God had made a different world it would not 
have happened. 

The history of the crusades against the Waldenses 



94 SECOND LECTURE. 

and the Albigenses is another of those horrible acci- 
dents springing from the accidental union of Church 
and State in the Romish Hierarchy. The proclama- 
tion of the Crusade by Pope Innocent III., and the 
army of half a million, under the banner of the Church, 
to exterminate with fire and sword the poor band of 
conscientious religionists, are the most infernal acci- 
dents in history. Such, too, was the massacre of the 
whole 23,000 people of Beriers. Such, too, was the 
comprehensive answer of the Romish Abbot who or- 
dered the assault/when consulted as to the fate of any 
Romish inhabitants who might be in the city, "Kill 
all! God will find out who belong to him!" A 
ferocious expression, which, Croly well observes, passes 
into a portraiture of the men and their times. These 
were the accidents of history ; historical accidents 
these, that make up the body of history for centuries. 
These tremendous events are, however, the accidents 
more particularly of the Romish Pontificate ; itself the 
greatest of all historical accidents. 



BURNING FOR HERESY JX ENGLAND. 

We will now pass over to England, and survey one 
of these accidents there, that it may be seen that they 
were not confined to the Pontifical court, nor to any 
part of the Romish Church, nor to any exclusive age 
in her existence, but were common to all countries and 
times, where the great historical accident of the Romish 
Church itself was established. We pass to the land of 
John Wickliffe, to the reign of Henry the Fourth, who 
seized the crown by the deposition of King Richard. 



BURNING FOR HERESY IN ENGLAND. 95 

In this usurpation of the throne he was greatly assisted, 
mark you, by Archbishop Arundel, and being resolutely 
bent upon securing possession of the crown, by what- 
ever means, he courted the favor of the Church ecclesi- 
astics. This could be gained in no more direct way, 
than by the punishment of the followers of WicklifTe. 
Their number w T as multiplying so rapidly, that the 
clergy began to regard the existing laws made to check 
the growth of heresy inadequate to their object. 
Whereupon they worked upon the king in representing 
the advantage he would gain by having a new law for 
the burning of heretics. Hence, in the year 1401, the 
bloody statute, called the statute ex officio, was enacted 
by the English Parliament at the instigation of this 
Henry the Fourth, set on by the Romish ecclesiastics, 
authorizing and commanding the bishops to proceed 
against all persons suspected of being tainted with he- 
resy. Such as were found guilty, and would not recant, 
w T ere to be u burned in the sight of all the people, to 
the intent that this kind of punishment might be a ter- 
ror unto others." This is one of the most remarkable 
examples in all history of the union of Church tyranny 
and State despotism for the destruction of men's liber- 
ties. We see two bitter usurpations uniting for the 
same selfish purpose, the support of despotic power ; 
they seek to accomplish it by the same end, and 
strengthen each other's ascendency by imprisonment, 
tortures, and flames. The formation of this statute, by 
the English Parliament, w r ith the influences under 
which it was procured, is a historical accident that 
reads a most terribly instructive lesson to mankind. 
It was the first time that the records of English juris- 
prudence were disgraced by a law to burn human be- 



96 S E COX D LECTURE. 

ings for the crime of choosing their own religious opi- 
nions. This is so amazing an exercise of bigotry and 
infernal cruelty under the guise of religion, that it is 
interesting and satisfactory in the highest degree to see 
the precise motives under which the power and its 
practice were established, to feel assured that there was 
no mixture of piety or of conscience in it, but the most 
diabolical league on record for the support and success 
of selfishness and crime. The king sought to support 
his usurpation by the favor of the priests ; the priests 
sought to support their usurpation by the power of the 
king ; and both joined in putting men to death for the 
liberty of conscience. Under this law, William Sau- 
tre, the pious rector of the parish of St. Osithe in Lon- 
don, was the first person burned to death in England. 
In grouping together the points of evil in the gov- 
ernment of the Church from the fifth to the twelfth 
century, Guizot observes, that in respect to liberty, 
two bad principles met together. " The first was a 
denial of the rights of individual reason — the claim of 
transmitting points of faith from the highest authority 
downwards, throughout the whole religious body, with- 
out allowing to any one the right of examining them 
for himself. The second vicious principle was the 
right of compulsion assumed by the Romish Church ; 
a right, however, contrary to the very nature and spi- 
rit of religious society, to the origin of the Church 
itself, and to its primitive maxims." A third evil 
and tyrannical principle Guizot mentions, that of 
violent interference with human thought, human lib- 
erty, private morals, individual opinions, the inward 
man, the conscience. Now unite these principles, as 
Guizot declares they w r ere united in the Romish Church, 



SAUL THE PERSECUTOR. 97 

and you have the most perfect, dreadful, remorseless, 
of all despotisms. You have a despotism that despot- 
izes and persecutes on principle, and for pretended 
conscience' sake. Of all fanaticism, that is the most 
dreadful. " With an anathematizing Deity, an ana- 
thematized world, and himself safe in the heart of the 
only Church, the zealot wants nothing that can render 
him malign and insolent." These are the words of an 
acute and powerful writer, the author of " Ancient 
Christianity." 

The Apostle Paul was an example of this fanaticism 
before his conversion ; and he was the most terrible 
enemy of human and religious liberty then in exist- 
ence. He persecuted the Church of Christ because 
he verily thought he was doing God service; and he 
thought himself bound to do it for the consolidation, 
the unity, of his own hierarchy. St. Paul, before his 
conversion, was the incarnation of Churchism without 
religion ; the prophetic incarnation in a Church aban- 
doned of God, of that zeal for the unity of the Church, 
that zeal for an Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which after- 
wards constituted the sole piety of the world for 
ages, and which flamed over the earth as Paul did 
over Judea, haling men and women, and committing 
them to prison, to tortures, to death, because they dif- 
fered from the established religion — because they would 
worship God according to the dictates of their own 
conscience. Doubtless Divine Providence suffered 
Paul to pass through this remorseless discipline of savage 
zeal, that when he came out of it, he might have such 
a horror of religious persecution, such a dread and 
hatred of zeal without love, and such a spirit of indo- 
mitable freedom, as should form an example to the 
world. Accordingly, you see in him an eagle eye to 



98 SECOND LECTURE, 

discern the features of that despotism which even then 
was beginning to cast its frowning shadows over the 
cradle of the infant Church. You see in him a spirit of 
fearless independence, a resistance to oppression, a jea- 
lousy against those who were coming in privily to spy 
out the liberty which they had in Christ Jesus, an elec- 
tric fire of religious freedom, that you see nowhere else. 
Not another Apostle ever was appointed to utter that 
great sentence, " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, 
there is liberty." It was to this man, to whose spiritual 
sight was unveiled, as he was guarding and praying 
for the spiritual welfare of Christ's Church — (her spi- 
ritual welfare, which was all the welfare he cared for, 
and all the welfare in danger ; and not her temporal 
power, which he had nothing to do with, and of w r hich 
she would have enough, if she sought first the kingdom 
of God and his righteousness) — it was to this man, 
thus wearing out soul and body in the flame of Christ, 
love to his people, that was unveiled and bodied 
forth from out the darkness of the future, the vast tow- 
ering form of Anti-Christ, sitting in the temple of God, 
and showing himself that he is God. The soul of the 
Apostle, for a season, must have quailed before that 
vision ; it made him ever afterwards a sadder and a 
wiser man. He saw, filling the w 7 hole horizon of the 
world, the grim features of the Man of Sin and Son of 
Perdition ; and again and again did the vision come up 
to him ; and, when it did, then his prophetic pencil 
touched into definite light, for others, some of its awful 
prominences. Then he spake of seducing spirits and 
doctrines of devils ; of lies in hypocrisy and consciences 
seared with hot iron ; of forbidding to marry and com- 
manding to abstain from meats. Then he said, " Let 



EXCOMMUNICATION. 99 

no man judge you in meat or drink, or in respect of an 
holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath. Let 
no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary hu- 
mility and worshipping of angels." Then he said of 
those false brethren who came in privily to bring them 
into bondage : " To whom we gave place by subjection, 
no, not for an hour, that the truth of the Gospel might 
continue with you." 

EXCOMMUNICATION — ITS ORIGIN, POWER, AND ABUSE. 

Connected intimately with this branch of our argu- 
ment is the history of the origin, nature, and dreadful 
increase and abuse of the power of excommunication. 
The simplicity of Church discipline in the primitive 
Church, you may find in the 18th chapter of Matthew, 
patient, quiet, affectionate, and, in the last resort, that, 
namely, of cutting off the offender from the member- 
ship of the Church, designed for his good and for the 
purification of the Church, and not for punishment. 
The first real abuse of this power was when Church 
censure came to be regarded as a punishment and a 
compulsory measure, or an assertion of pre-eminence 
on the part of one Church over another, or of one bishop 
over others; Even in the time of John, this evil had 
commenced : " I wrote unto the Church, but Diotre- 
phes, who loveth to have the pre-eminence among 
them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will 
remember his evil deeds which he doeth, prating against 
us with malicious words ; and, not content therewith, 
neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and for- 
biddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the 
Church" In the case of those who made divisions and 
offences, contrary to the Gospel, Paul's direction was 
simply to " avoid them." (Rom. 16, 17.) And again, 



100 SECOND LECTURE 

(2 Thess. 3, 14), a to note such a disobedient man, 
and have no company with him, that he might be 
ashamed. Yet, count him not as an enemy, but ad- 
monish him as a brother." 

I have already delineated the progress of the mixed 
civil and ecclesiastical judicature, and the unlimited 
height of power to which it arose, traced so clearly by 
Campbell and others, to Paul's simple caution not to 
go to law before unbelievers, and also to the 18th of 
Matthew. In a like gradual manner, on such passages 
as have now been noted, grew up a system of Church 
punishments, grades of penances, and at length the 
supreme and awful terrors of excommunication in the 
middle ages. At first, the measure of excommunica- 
tion was resorted to principally in reference to those 
who, in times of persecution, fell away — the lapsi, as 
they were called; and schisms and controversies took 
place concerning the treatment of such lapsi. The first 
instance of an appeal to the civil power in the disci- 
pline of the Church, was about the year 313, in the 
case of the Donatists, against whom severe laws were 
passed by the emperor. When the general councils, 
supported by imperial power, came to establish posi- 
tive articles of faith for catholic uniformity, schisms 
and heresies became frequent, and theological contro- 
versies became political disputes. Henceforward, ex- 
communication became a mixed civil and ecclesiastical 
weapon of dread severity and power. Banishment was 
connected with it — exclusion from various privileges 
and offices, and ineffable odium and disgrace. The 
bishops availed themselves of the arm of the state to 
put down their enemies; and, in proportion as the 
morals of the Church became more corrupt, the treat- 
ment of heretics became constantly more severe. The 



E X C OM M US I <J A T I X . 101 

cruel enforcement of a rigid uniformity in opinions and 
ceremonies formed a sort of balance to the utmost lax- 
ity and wickedness in morals. From the period of 
Constantine, the terror of excommunication, enforced 
by the civil law, increased ; but, from the seventh 
century downwards, they began to assume the awful 
character and power, which at length could hurl kings 
from their thrones and make common men to be shun- 
ned and persecuted as demons. 

Of the terror w T ith which the curse of excommunica- 
tion was regarded, even when unattended by civil pe- 
nalties, and inflicted without cause, and at an early 
period, even before the establishment of the papal 
power, you may form some idea from the fact related 
by Theodoret, and commented on by Valesius, and to 
be found, both fact and comment, in the pages of Jor- 
tin, that an impudent monk came one day to the Em- 
peror Theodosius to beg some favor, and being by him 
refused, deliberately excommunicated him, and then 
went his way. The superstitious emperor, thereupon, 
would neither eat nor drink till the monk could be 
found and persuaded to take off the curse. "This is a 
proof," remarks Valesius, " that the canon law is true, 
which declares that excommunication, though unjustly 
inflicted, is to be dreaded." What cold, grim shadows 
of superstition and religious despotism were at this 
time creeping over men's minds ! 

But this freak of the monk, and this terror of the 
emperor, were child's play in comparison with the in- 
describable horrors with which this ecclesiastical pun- 
ishment was afterwards invested. The fabled freezing 
prodigies of Medusa's head, all 

" Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire," 

are harmless fancies by the side of it. I know of no- 

7 



102 SECOND lecture; 

thing that might stand as a description of it, but Mil- 
ton's awfully sublime picture of Death in company with 
Sin, keeping guard over hell. Its fulminating bolts 
were demoniac lightning and thunder ; they accom- 
plished infernal purposes. The excommunicated per- 
son, by his exclusion from the rites of the Church, be- 
came abhorred of God and man ; the interdict of hu- 
man society was laid upon him ; he lost all rights as a 
man and a citizen ; a creature stricken with the plague 
could not be an abject of more suspicious horror and 
hatred; a man wa's no longer regarded as a husband, 
or father, or neighbor, but as a brute, a fiend, an out- 
law, an enemy. Heaven and earth were against him, 
the curse of the elements was upon him, humanity 
itself scowled on him and shuddered at him, when the 
ban of the Church marked him for universal fear and de- 
testation. He could own no property, hold no office, 
receive no favor, retain neither relative nor friend. The 
curse of the Church froze up the life-blood even of na- 
tural affection ; it could turn parents against children, 
and children against parents; it absolved subjects from 
their allegiance to kings; it set the son and heir appa- 
rent in arms against the kingly father. The curse ex- 
tended to the dead ; the body could have no Christian 
burial ; and the soul under it was to be bound and bu- 
ried in hell for ever. In England, in the thirteenth 
century, when the kingdom was laid under a national 
ban, all the churches were closed, all the ceremonials 
and institutions of religion suspended, except baptism, 
confession, and the viaticum in the last extremity ; the 
images of the saints were laid on the ground, the bells- 
were silent, the funeral solemnities were abandoned, 
and the dead thrown into pits. A total eclipse of the 



KXCO MMUN1CATION. 103 

sun at noon-day, in the most ignorant and superstitious 
ages of the world, would not strike half the deadly- 
terror that this did into the human mind. So ghastly 
and horrible a form of superstition was it in the fullness 
of its power. 

And this power is traced with great skill and cer- 
tainty, first to the excommunicating ceremonies of the 
Pagan priests, second to the awful forms of the reli- 
gion of Druidism ; the Christian excommunication be- 
ing supposed by the ignorant proselytes and the super- 
stitious barbarians to possess the same effect with the 
Pagan. When the Druids excommunicated a man, 
the unhappy wretch, interdicted from the sacrifices, 
was shunned by the whole world as an infernal pest ; 
no speech was had with him, and he was like to die 
from universal abhorrence and neglect. All these ex- 
otic terrors the Romish priests soon transplanted and 
naturalized in their own system, which they thus made 
infinitely a stronger despotism over mankind. No lan- 
guage can describe, no mind can conceive, in this day 
of light and freedom, how awful and omnipotent it was 
in this one element of superstitious power. If the 
Pope could have stood on the steps of his palace in 
Rome, and at a wave of his wand could have filled 
the universal world with grinning, gliding spectres, if 
he could have called frogs up out of the rivers, if he 
could have turned the dust into lice, and the day into 
midnight darkness, he could scarcely have wielded a 
more tremendous spell of superstition over men's minds* 
And how infinitely abhorrent from this are the whole 
spirit and measures of the Gospel, not one word need 
be said to remind you. But you will remark that this 
punishment, even in the darkest age, could never have 
compressed such an active intensity of suffering and 



104 SECOND LECTURE. 

terror in itself, had it been merely a spiritual punish- 
ment, had it not been united with the plenitude of tem- 
poral power, had it not been able to wield the secular 
arm in all ways, for its execution. And you will re- 
mark that as a crisis of evil, its power was a concen- 
tration of almost all the abuses and corruptions of Chris- 
tianity, and all the mistaken conceptions of mankind in 
regard to the clergy, and their illimitable power over 
the spiritual world, fostered during successive ages by 
the priesthood. It was the great iron padlock that 
gathered together, rn one enormous adamantine bolt, 
all the chains which superstition had been winding 
round the human mind for ages. And methinks that 
Satan on his dark throne, even with his face of pain, 
must have grinned a lurid smile of exulting malignity 
when he heard the Pope on earth put his key into that 
padlock, and turn its crashing, resounding, thundering 
bolt upon the nations. I am reminded of Mr. Cole- 
ridge's terrific eclogue : 

" Where all the iiends that damned be 
Clapped their hands, and danced for glee ; 
They no longer heeded me, 
But laughed to hear hell's burning rafters 
Unwillingly re-echo laughters !" 

For if there could be such a scene in hell, it would be 
when such vast scenes of blasphemy and cruelty as 
required the full mixture of human ingenuity and infer- 
nal malignity, were transacted upon earth. 

Here, then, in the exercise of this power of excom- 
munication, you see the Union of Church and State in 
its perfection. I have already shown how, in the very 
deepest darkness of the noon of the world's night, and 
amidst the very supremest exercise of the power of the 



EXCOMMUNICATION 



105 



Papacy, with all mankind trembling, shivering, and 
pale before it, with empires at its beck, doubters in its 
dungeons, rebels in its fires, it could say, if it pleased, 
The Romish Church abhors the Union of Church and 
State, simply because it could say, The Romish Church 
will not recognize the State as a partner or rival in 
power, but will rather employ it as a tool and a ser- 
vant ! In the execution of this power of excommuni- 
cation there was such an employment. And I thank 
Bishop Hughes, with all my heart, that in his Lecture 
he has himself turned our attention towards it, though 
in the attempt to palliate and excuse and justify its 
exercise. Certainly of all apologies for the power of 
excommunication, and the launching of its thunders on 
the world, it is the most singularly amusing to say that 
at least the Popes let loose their thunders with equal 
facility against the poor and the rich, against the 
weak and the powerful, against rebellious serfs, eccle- 
siastics, end emperors. The Pope was impartial, 
nobly impartial, in the use of this terrific power ! 
Certainly he was. He launched it against all the 
Pope's enemies. It was the impartiality of a power 
in exercise, determined to bring all men and authori- 
ties in subjection to it ; so that whether the rebellion 
were in the uplifted soul and sceptre of a monarch, or 
in the lowly heart of a monk in Eisleben, or in the 
harmless simplicity of poor pilgrims travelling towards 
heaven in the valleys of the Waldenses, loose went 
that thunder, striking the Monarch from his throne, 
the peasant into fires and dungeons, and the Eisleben 
monk too, if God had not held him in his own hand, 
high above all earthly thundering and lightning. It 
was the impartiality of a remorseless evil will, sacri- 
ficing all that stands against it ; the impartiality of a 



106 SECOND LECTURE. 

forest conflagration, that at once crackles the giant 
trees, and consumes the shrubbery and the grasses. 
Impartiality indeed ! The Church is made a vast 
Juggernaut to be dragged over the prostrate neck of 
men's liberties, and you apologise for the butchery it 
makes of thousands of poor people under its wheels, 
by telling us that now and then it rolls over and 
crushes crowned heads and nobles ! Yes ! this was 
the impartiality of excommunication ! May God in 
his mercy preserve our fallen world evermore from 
such antics of damnation. It is almost a libel on our 
fallen human nature, bad as that is, to attempt any 
apology for them. 

You may learn, from what has been said on this 
topic, in w T hat sense to take the assertion of Bishop 
Hughes, that excommunication was the highest penalty 
known to the Church. It was indeed the highest, be- 
cause it comprehended all others, and could direct 
against its helpless victim, any engines of cruelty, or 
all at once, which ecclesiastical ingenuity could de- 
vise, or the secular arm, at the suggestion and com- 
mand of the Church, could set in motion. It was the 
highest, because it went before all others, and pre- 
pared the way for the infliction of all miseries and tor- 
tures ; it was, as I have said of the Inquisition, like 
Death on the Pale Horse issuing out of hell, and hell 
following with it, with power over the earth, to kill 
witli the sword, and with hunger and with flames, and 
with death and with the beasts of the earth. I beg 
my hearers to read, in Prescott's admirable history of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, the seventh chapter of the 
first volume, on the establishment of the modern In- 
quisition. And I beg their attention to this historian's 
opinion concerning Llorente's History of that infernal 



A LESSON FOR MANKIND. 107 

tribunal " It well deserves to be studied," says he, 
*' as the record of the most humiliating triumph which 
fanaticism has ever been able to obtain over human 
reason, and that too during the most civilized periods, 
and in the most civilized portion of the world. The 
persecutions endured by the unfortunate author of the 
work prove that the embers of this fanaticism may be 
rekindled too easily even in the present century." 

A LESSON FOR MANKIND- 

The history of religious persecution reads an awful 
lesson to mankind. It shows that intolerance is as 
natural to the human mind as the love of power, and 
that every religious sect in turn, when it has gained 
the power, has persecuted. It is a terrific fact that in 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Protestant Queen, 
more than 160 Roman Catholic Priests and others were 
put to death for their religion. Queen Elizabeth being 
the heartless murderer of Queen Mary of Scotland, it 
is not so surprising that she should also burn others. 
But this hideous cruelty has been practised even by 
benevolent and pious men, so that w T e find there is no 
safety against intolerance but to deprive it of power. 
When vou have done this, you have taken the fangs 
out of the viper, but not before. Take the catalogue 
of good men of every persuasion who have persecuted 
-even unto death, and you are compelled to acknow- 
ledge that religious intolerance seems the last element 
of human depravity, that ever yields to the influence 
of grace ; it is the last demon that goes out of the 
mind, and the hardest io exorcise. Neither learning, 
nor refinement, nor natural gentleness and mildness, 
nor magnanimous virtue, nor generosity, nor religion 



108 SECOND LECTUR E. 

itself, are proof against it. Therefore let it never have 
the power. 

Here I would desire the audience, if they have op- 
portunity, to consult the tenth lecture, with its admoni- 
tory appendix, in the admirable volumes of Professor 
Smyth, of Cambridge in England, on Modern History ; 
a work republished in this country under the care of 
Jared Sparks, L.L. D., and forming an invaluable text 
book. The author's remarks on the subject of religious 
persecution are full of instruction. He enumerates 
some of the best men who have been guilty of it. V Pli- 
ny, Louis the Ninth, before the Reformation; Melanc- 
thon, Cranmer and Ridley, after the Reformation. If 
there be any characters in history, that in every other 
respect but this of intolerance, are the ornaments of 
their nature, they are these. If these are not favorable 
specimens of mankind, none can be found ; vigorous 
in their understandings, cultivated in their minds, gen- 
tle in their nature, conversant with the world and its 
business, refined and pure and perfect, as far as in this 
sublunary state perfection can be found. These are 
certainly most .awful lessons." 

But with all this, it must ever be kept in mind that 
there is a difference heaven-wide between the Romish 
Church and other persuasions, because that Church 
makes the persecution of heretics an article of faith ! 
When the members of other sects persecute, they do 
it in opposition to their principles ; for the grand rule 
of Protestants is liberty of the Scriptures and liberty of 
opinion ; but the Romish sect allows no such liberty, 
and regards freedom of opinion itself as a heresy to be 
persecuted unto the death. 

I would no more trust a Presbyterian with the power 
to persecute than I would a papist, but for this 
one consideration. The Romish system has the terrible 



A LESSON Poll MANKIND. 109 

pre-eminence of haying made religious persecution a 
doctrine of the Church. There is no denying this ; it 
is an essential element of the Romish religion to perse- 
cute heretics, when it can be done. Here, then, is a 
mighty distinction between the Romanists and all other 
sects ; the Romanists persecute on principle, as a doc- 
trine of the Church. There is all the difference be- 
tween the occasional intolerance of other sects and 
the habitual intolerance of the Romanists that there is 
between an epidemic like the influenza, which some- 
times proves fatal, and a contagious disease like the 
plague or yellow fever. 

This, of course, is the reason why w^e are afraid of 
Romanism. It is an ox, that has been wont to gore. 
Its assumption of infallibility alone would inevitably 
lead to the compulsion and punishment of heretics. 
And in the same measure we are afraid of any other 
Church, that makes the same claim, takes the same 
exclusive ground, unchurches other communions, and 
gives them over to God's uncovenanted mercies. The 
uncovenanted mercies of Cod prove in the end, when 
the plague has reached its crisis, when the hard car- 
buncle is formed, to be the ferocity of human intole- 
rance, the rack, the dungeon, the scaffold, the stake. 
The uncovenanted mercies of God are red and hot with 
the flames of human vengeance ; they are but a con- 
cealed form of the Papal thunder of the dark ages ; 
put the bolt into the hands of Ecclesiastics, and dark- 
ness, fire and storm hold a revelry ; the seven vials of 
the Apocalypse are well-nigh poured upon the nations. 
And if this claim of infallibility, and this denunciation 
of dissenters, and this unchurching exclusiveness, and 
this contempt of conventicles, and this assertion of the 
7* 



110 SECOND LECTURE. 

Form above the Spirit, come to be united to an Estab- 
lishment and thus invested with the power of the 
State, or having that power at command, to be used 
at pleasure, then farew r ell to the sacred possession of 
religious liberty ; then the air is filled w T ith a storm of 
test acts and civil penalties ; then, in certain cases, dis- 
senters, even in the nineteenth century, may seek in 
vain for a burial-place for the very bodies of their child- 
ren ; then the theory of intolerance is boldly broached, 
and penalties in religious things are defended, and 
from religious tyranny it is but one step to civil despot- 
ism ; the ecclesiastics who put the crown of suprema- 
cy upon religious tyranny, do dig the grave and attend 
the funeral of both civil and religious freedom. The 
bridge is throw r n up, 

And with asphaltic slime, broad as the gate, 
Deep to the roots of hell, the gathered beach 
Is fastened, — and the mole immense wrought on. 

EVILS OF AN ESTABLISHMENT. 

I do not wish to go into the history of the Romish 
Church for proof of this. Read over the history of 
England, Protestant England, from the tyranny of 
Henry the Eighth to the Supremacy of Queen Victoria^ 
as Head of the Church and State. Read it in the 
Romish as well as the Protestant historians ; in Lin- 
gard and in Dodd, as well as in Turner and Neal and 
Hume and Fuller. Read it, and see in it the accursed 
fretting; leprosy of an Establishment, as the conse- 
quence of installing one sect as the supreme religion of 
the State, its consequence in hypocrisy, arrogance, 
bitterness, contempt ; ambition, avarice, and luxury in 
the clergy ; persecution unto imprisonment and death, 



EVILS OF AN ESTABLISHMENT. Ill 

of Nonconformists, Dissenters, Heretics, Romanists, all, 
who conscientiously please to stay out of the reigning 
Church and worship by themselves. I say it is power 
put into religious hands, put at the beck of a religious 
hierarchy, that hath done this ; or, if no hierarchy, the 
barest Congregationalism will do the same. The 
Apostle John himself would at one time have burnt 
all Samaria, if he could have done it. Our argument 
then is first against the horrible doctrine of religious 
persecution^ and against the Church that maintains and 
sanctions it, the Romish Church, by eminence above 
all others. Second, it is against such unchurching ex- 
clusiveness in any Church though not holding cruelty 
as a doctrine, but yet holding other Churches as dis- 
senters, and therefore opening the way for such cruelty. 
And third, it is against such an Establishment, or pos- 
session of civil power in any Church, as may hold out 
the temptation to persecute, when occasion offers, 
either by rewards or penalties. An Establishment car- 
ries in it the venom of persecution, because it offers the 
poisoned cup of power to the lips of the clergy ; and 
power over the conscience is what no man, or council, 
or state, on earth, ever yet could be trusted with. So 
far then we include all denominations, as Bishop 
Hughes has rightly done, in the blame of religious 
persecution. But mark you, there is an infinite differ- 
ence between persecution as a doctrine, and persecu- 
tion as an incident ; between persecution as an article 
of the Church, and persecution as an occasional sin of 
passion. Persecution belongs to the Romish Church ; 
though it has been resorted to, in turn, by every other 
Church, the Quakers only excepted, to their immortal 
honor. In the Romish Church there has been the 
habit of persecution for centuries ; it is a chronic dis- 



112 SECOND LECTURE. 

ease ; this is one of the lessons burned by the Papacy 
into the civilisation and Christianity of mankind for 
ages. The great seal of the Papacy ought to be the 
stake, the fire, and a burning saint ; and in point of 
fact a medal was recast at Rome in 1839 to com- 
memorate the butchering of Protestants at the festival 
of St. Bartholomew. It is from the Romish Church 
that the lesson of persecution was derived and learned 
by Protestants ; a lesson occasionally practised by 
them, but by their teachers sanctioned and adopted as 
a religious theory. And it is by acts such as the re- 
casting of this medal, and by other significant demon- 
strations, that the Papal Church does openly show to 
the world that she is still the same persecuting Church 
as ever, when persecution can be enacted with safety. 
It is by such acts and demonstrations as these, that the 
Papal Church sanctions the truth of her own portrait 
both in history and the Word of God, as "the Woman 
drunken with the blood of the Saints. 55 



PROOF THAT RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IS A DOCTRINE OF 
THE ROMISH CHURCH. 

Now, I am not going to let this pass, though perfectly 
well known, under the seal of mere generalization. 
From confirmation strong as holy writ will I show to 
you that religious persecution is a doctrine of the Ro- 
mish Church. I might give you the words of Pope 
upon Pope, and Council upon Council, excommunicating 
and condemning heretics, and giving them over to the 
secular arm to be punished. I take the last first, and 
find the general Council of Trent as late as the six- 



ROMISH PERSECUTION. 113 

ieenth century, enjoining the extermination of heretics 
by the sword, the fire, the rope, and all other means, 
when it could be done with safety. Perhaps the acts 
of this council were an indication to the mind of Bishop 
Hughes, of that better state of civilisation and religion 
which would bless the world ; that culmination of light 
and glory into which it would have advanced, had it 
not been for the unfortunate intervention of the Refor- 
mation. But I take what is better to prove my point 
than the decrees of Councils or the bulls of Popes. I 
take the oath, which all Roman Catholic bishops at 
their consecration are required to take, and which, as it 
is extant in the Roman Pontifical, set out by order of 
Pope Clement VIII., swears obedience " to the holy 
Roman Church, and to our lord the Pope, and to his 
successors ;" and which has this tremendous sentence, 
" Heretics, schismatics and rebels to our said lord, 
or his foresaid successors, i will, to my power, 
persecute and oppose. 55 The whole oath may be found 
in the learned Dr. Barrow's Treatise on the Supremacy 
of the Pope, which book men have well done in repub- 
lishing in this country.* Now I do not want any other 
proof than this; I would not give a fig for volumes in 

* The oath is as follows : 

"I, N., elect of the Church of N., from henceforward will he 
faithful and obedient to St. Peter the Apostle, and to the holy 
Roman Church, and to our lord, the lord N. Pope N. and to his 
successors, canonically coming in. I will neither advise, con- 
sent, or do anything that they may lose life or member, or that 
their persons may be seized, or hands anywise laid upcn them, or 
any injuries offered to them, under any pretence whatsoever. The 
counsel which they shall intrust me withal, by themselves, their 
messengers, or letters, I will not knowingly reveal to any to their 
prejudice. I will help them to defend and keep the Roman pa- 
pacy, and the royalties of St. Peter, saving my order, against all 
men. The legate of the apostolic See, going and coming, I will 
honorably treat and help in his necessities. The rights, hon- 



114 SECOND LECTURE. 

addition. A Church that makes the ministers at its 

ors, privileges, and authority of the holy Roman Church, of 
our lord the Pope, and his foresaid successors, I will endeavor 
to preserve, defend, increase, and advance. I will not be in any 
counsel, action, or treaty, in which shall be plotted against our 
said lord, and the said Roman Church, anything to the hurt or 
prejudice of their persons, right, honor, state, or power; and if 
I shall know any such thing to be treated 01 agitated by any 
whatsoever, I will hinder it to my power ; and as soon as I can 
will signify it to our said lord, or to some other, by whom it may 
come to his knowledge. The rules of the holy Fathers, the 
apostolic decrees, ordinances, or disposals, reservations, provi- 
sions, and mandates, I will observe with all my might, and cause 
to be observed by others. Heretics, schismatics, and rebels to 
our said lord, or his foresaid successors, I will to my power per- 
secute and oppose. I will come to a council when I am called, 
unless I be hindered by a canonical impediment. I will by my- 
self in person visit the threshold of the Apostles every three 
years ; and give an account to our lord and his foresaid succes- 
sors of all my pastoral office, and of all things anywise belong- 
ing to the state of my Church, to the discipline of my clergy 
and people, and lastly to the salvation of souls committed to my 
trust ; and will in like manner humbly receive and diligently exe- 
cute the apostolic commands. And if I be detained by a lawful 
impediment, I will perform all the things aforesaid by a certain 
?nessenger hereto specially impowered, a member of my chapter, 
or some other in ecclesiastical dignity, or else having a parson- 
age ; or in default of these, by a priest of the diocese ; or in de- 
fault of one of the clergy [of the diocese], by some other secular 
or regular priest of approved integrity and religion, fully in- 
structed in ail things ahove-mentioned. And such impediment I 
will make out by lawful proofs to be transmitted by the foresaid 
messenger to the cardinal proponent of the holy Roman Church 
in the congregation of the sacred council. The possessions be- 
longing to my table I will neither sell, nor give away, nor mort- 
gage, nor grant anew in fee, nor anywise alienate, no, not even 
with the consent of the chapter of my Church, without consult- 
ing the Roman Pontiff. And if I shall make any alienation, 1 
will thereby incur the penalties contained in a certain constitu- 
tion put forth about this matter. So help me God and these 
holy Gospels of God." 

" Such," remarks Barrow, " is the oatli prescribed to bishops, the 
which is worth the most serious attention of all men, who would 
understand how miserably slavish the condition of the clergy is 
in that Church, and how inconsistent their obligation to the Pope 
is with their duty to their Prince.' , 



ROMANISM ALWAYS THE SAME. 115 

altar swear that they will persecute, is by eminence 
THE persecuting Church of the world ; and the only 
reason why she does not display that feature here, is 
because in this blessed country, our dear republic, she 
cannot, neither she nor any other Church. And the 
reason why she does not now display this feature in 
England, is not because the persecuting spirit has gone 
out of men's souls, but because, from the time of Henry 
VIII. downwards, the monarch has taken the Pope's 
supremacy to himself, and is a Pope in his ow r n king- 
dom; and the State in alliance with the Protestant 
Church now chooses to do all the persecution. For a 
proof, both of the humiliating dependence of the Church 
upon the State in England, and yet of the persecuting 
propensities of the English Hierarchy, I refer you to 
the vigorous work of Sir Michael Foster on the scheme 
of Church power. And if I wished to send you to an 
unexceptionable witness for an independent sanction of 
the rule of persecution as the doctrine of the Romish 
Church, I need only name the great, the learned, the 
celebrated, the pious, the well-nigh worshipped St. 
Bernard, who held, in the most determined manner, 
" the utter inconsistency of any sort of toleration with 
the first principles of the papacy;" and who sternly 
argued " that schismatics and heretics, after resisting 
argument and persuasion, were, by the aid of the secu- 
lar power, to be pursued to death, in whatever way 
might seem the most sure and safe." 

SAMENESS OF ROMANISM FROM AGE TO AGE, AND THE 
RULE FOR INVESTIGATING ITS NATURE. 

I think the preceding facts and reasonings have 
given sufficient answer to the question whether Roman- 
ism now is the same with Romanism in the Middle 



116 SECOND LECTURE. 

Ages. The rules laid down by an acute and powerful 
writer for our investigation of the nature and spirit of 
the Romish Despotism are founded in truth, namely, 
that we are to take those writers, who have occupied 
high stations in the Church, and those times when 
the Church was in her prosperity, and enjoyed an 
unrestricted authority. You can no more judge 
the nature of the Papal Hierarchy by the writings 
or assertions of a dignitary born and educated in Amer- 
ica, than you could determine the nature of a tiger by 
seeing the splendid creature as docile as a kitten at the 
feet of Herr Driesbach : you must meet it in a jungle, 
and whether in its native woods, or in any other woods, 
it is no matter. Undoubtedly, the genius of Romanism 
in this country is tamed ; let me rather say, in the words 
of the eloquent apostrophe of Curran to the freedom of 
Great Britain, it is destined, by touching the sacred soil 
of a free religious republic, to stand redeemed, regen- 
erated, and disenthralled, with the tiger transformed 
to the lamb, the vulture to the dove. But as to the 
essential nature of Romanism in all times and countries, 
the words of that writer (the author of " Spiritual Des- 
potism") to whom I have referred, are worth ponder- 
ing. " The difference of style and feeling," he says, 
" occasioned by the Lutheran schism is very clearly 
perceptible in the Romanist writers of all classes ; for 
while the bold and intemperate are far more extrava- 
gant and impudent, than were their predecessors of the 
same stamp, the reasonable, the conciliatory, and the 
philosophic, labor with the utmost diligence and in- 
genuity to soften the features of the Romish tyranny, 
to excuse its intolerance, to recommend on general 
grounds its superstitions, and to bring it, as far as pos- 
sible, into accordance with the Spirit of Christianity, 



R M A N I S U A L W A Y S T HE SAME, 1 1 7 

and with the feelings and usages of modern times. But 
as we are bound in fairness to reject the exaggerated 
Romanism of the one class of modern writers, so should 
we pass by, as unauthentic and spurious, the novel lib- 
erality, and the spirituality of the other. We do not 
ask Fenelon, or Pascal, or the Jansenists, or Dr. Doyle, 
or Mr. Butler, what Romanism is, any more than we 
put that question to certain infamous Spanish Jesuits 
of the seventeenth century : but turn to the Popes, and 
the authentic doctors of the middle ages. The princi- 
ples avowed by these high authorities, and the practices 
founded upon these principles, are consistent one with 
another; are necessary parts of the great ecclesiasti- 
cal theory ; and are such as must, in every age, be 
professed and followed by the Romish Church, w T here 
she enjoys full liberty, and is not compelled to adapt 
herself to political necessities. If Protestantism were 
annihilated, and princes once more brought down to 
their place, as the obedient sons and champions of the 
Church, then this Church would be and must be the 
very same in spirit and in practice that it was in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That which makes 
modern Popery more tolerable, and in some respects 
less pernicious to a people, than ancient Popery was, 
is precisely that admixture of better notions, which it 
has furtively obtained from Protestantism. But all 
such mitigations and corrections the consistent Roman- 
ist must regard as adulterations, and must wish to ex- 
clude and repel." 

Here I would refer you to a series of significant 
questions bearing directly on the point before us, and 
to be found in a journal, which no man will suspect of 
hostility to Romanism, the New York Churchman. 






118 SECOND LECTUKE. 

Rible, judicious, pointed articles to be found in tha 

paper. 

" Of course we do not hold the modern adherents of Rome ao 
countable for the sins of their fathers. All of us certainly may 
find enough in the history of the past to destroy our boasting, 
and to awaken the sentiments of humility and penitence. But it 
is fair to ask what sense have Romanists of these abuses, and 
what security against their recurrence ? Is the system of indul- 
gences restored to its primitive limits, or are they still dispensed 
by the Pope as a pretended means of abridging the punishments 
of the future life ? Is the Pope content with the primacy which 
was once and might again be beneficent* in its tendency, or is he 
accounted the bishop of bishops and lord of lords ? Has the 
Church in any particular country, say in the United States, ulti- 
mate authority in matters not of faith, or is the ultimatum of dif- 
ferences still an appeal to Rome ? Is the election of Bishops for 
American Sees confirmed in America or at Rome ? Are the 
Scriptures acknowledged to be the Christian's Birthright which 
the clergy are in duty bound to keep before the faithful, or are 
they merely allowed to be read under favor ? Are the laity al- 
lowed a voice in the choice of pastors and bishops ? And since 
we have no union of Church and State, and consequently no 
check on the part of civil government against the aggression of a 
foreign spiritual power, it is important to ask whether the Ameri- 
can laity are admitted to unite with the clergy in the control of 
temporalities, and in legislating on those matters (and of course 
those only) on which particular churches are competent to legis- 
late, or whether all these matters are left exclusively to a clergy 
in but not of the United States, and responsible to a foreign 
Potentate ?" 

These questions are full of significance. The an- 
swer to them condemns the system of Romanism in 
every point, as a system of abuses, against the recur- 
rence of which we have no security. This chapter of 
interrogatories furnishes a good close to our present 
argument. We have left three points as yet untouched. 

* Which never was and never could be beneficent, except by 
God's prerogative of bringing good out of evil. The Papal Pri- 
macy was always evil, and almost only evil, continually. And 
it was always in direct contravention of the prohibition of our 
Blessed Lord, " Call no Man master on earth, for all ye are 
brethren. 



CONCLUSION . 

In my next lecture I propose to dwell upon the dis- 
astrous influence of the mixture of civil and ecclesias- 
tical power, in the governments of the middle ages ? 
upon learning and literature. The body of the Canon 
Law will come under examination ; and in this con- 
nection I shall show the influence of the Papacy and 
the Church in repressing all attempts after freedom. I 
shall show the reasons for the jealousy of the Romish 
Hierarchy against the Scriptures, and the tremendous 
consequences that would follow, if the Bible could be 
excluded from our schools, and kept in the iron chest 
of the priesthood. I shall endeavor to redeem my pro- 
mise of looking upon the great faces of Chaucer and 
Dante. I shall also have a gaze at the greater coun- 
tenance of that greatest enemy of the Romish despot- 
ism — Martin Luther. 



conclusion. 

And now I shall only add the mention of what, be- 
sides the disenthralling influence of our Republican free- 
dom, is our only reliance for the change and regenera- 
tion of the Romish Church in this country— the descent 
of the Holy Spirit on people and priest. "When that 
baptism by the Holy Spirit of God takes place, which 
every Church is to receive from Heaven, then will all 
the leaven of hierarchical despotism be cast out \ then 
will oppression cease ; then will the rights of the peo- 
ple be recognized and their privileges preserved ; then 
will the Churches of Christ be one vast brotherhood ; 
then will Ephraim no more envy Judah, nor Judah vex 
Ephraim ; then will that unity of love be prevalent, 
which our blessed Lord requires, and without which all 



120 C ONQLUSION. 

other unity is worthless ; then will there be, in every di- 
rection, the kindest charity and piety, but no pride ; then 
will Christians, as Paul requires, receive one another, 
but not to doubtful disputations, and all sects will be 
found vying with one another not to spread their own 
name, but the knowledge of the Saviour ; not to eject 
each other from the missionary field, but to fill the 
world with love and mercy. 

We trust in God that this spirit shall prevail over 
every other, and when it does, then shall be the time 
when there shall be nothing to hurt or destroy in all 
God's holy mountain. Then his sacred watchmen 
shall see eye to eye ; and as he of one persuasion, in 
that far off region where the darkness struggles with 
the light, shall cry to another, Watchman ! what of 
the night ? the other shall answer, The night is past, 
and a morn of glory dawneth ! Yea, even now it 
spreads, it runneth as the light from heaven, it tips the 
mountain-tops with glory, it pours into the lowest vales 
its flood, it rushes, it bursts over all the earth ! Yea, 
this is the coming and kingdom of the Son of God ; 
this is the ineffable unity of the Church of Christ, a 
unity of light and love, peace on earth, good will to 
man glory to God in the highest. 




MIXTURE OF CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL POWER 



IN THS 



GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES 



IN ILLUSTRATION OF THE NATURE AND PROGRESS 
OF DESPOTISM IN THE ROMISH CHURCH. 



3m 



BY 



REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER. 



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